Wow, this console is actually really awesome. It's the first non-command line based tool package that I'll actually be using. I was surprised when they launched AWS that they didn't have something like this in the beginning. The service seems complete now.
The learning curve is now reduced to a level where normal people can figure out how to use AWS in under an hour.
It's not as ajaxy, but RightScale's stuff can do a good bit more than Amazon's EC2 dashboard. Honestly, I was hoping Amazon would create something at least as good as free RightScale when I read this-- but it feels a bit worse than what most of us have been using for a good while.
This interface does look slick, though-- if they get it caught up in functionality I'd probably use it over RS. The release of this tool might reduce RightScale's valuation a tad since it does kind of indicate that Amazon's not in the market to buy someone like them.
? Are we seeing the same UI? I'm not the world's biggest fan of the UI, but I've worked with much worse. It's a very deep web app, so it'd be a shame if startups dismiss a free tool because of a comment like that.
Maybe I've just been using it for so long that I've gotten used to it? At the time we started using it, it was the only dashboard that interfaced with all of the core AWS services. We happen to use a good bit of SQS and S3, so being able to browse those from time to time has been handy and prevented our team from having to write some of those tools ourselves.
Hopefully we'll all win and Amazon will upgrade their tool to have lots more features.
I'd be inclined to agree except that anyone with your Amazon email/pass already has access to your public/secret keys. So, it's not much of a security hole since a person with your account details could simply log in and grab your keys.
Still, it would be nice if Amazon offered a "high security" option that didn't trust password authentication and couldn't re-give you your secret key. I probably wouldn't use it, but it's still a good thing to offer.
> "a "high security" option that didn't trust password authentication and couldn't re-give you your secret key"
And no way to reset it? What if you have VMs currently running that need to be stopped ($$)? And if there's a reset then it's the same thing as your point, anyone with your password has access (unless you're thinking email but that's worse than the current https delivery of secret keys IMO).
I like the idea in spirit.
I also think they would do well with a delegation of rights model (that included limited delegation). Any of these portals (Rightscale etc.) need you to upload your full credentials for anything to work.
In the next few days we'll see comparisons from all the external EC2 portal efforts, forced now to highlight only their 'value add'.
It's always interesting to see where AWS is willing to step on the toes of all of the 3rd parties building enabling tools. And who they let in to their private betas (with EBS, some people were publicly feeling dissed).
I think it's the same story as with any other platform vendor for - no partner is absolutely safe from incursion. The ones that survive are the ones that have large, loyal customer base (e.g. Quicken) or can move very fast.
Look at it the other way: What if Amazon was planning a Web console all along? Should they give up because someone beat them to it? If a third party implements a feature (persistent storage, load balancing, HA, auto-scaling), should Amazon be blocked from building that feature?
I agree, it's not indecent of them or anything (unless maybe they outright lied to someone about it; it's very hard to speculate about these things from the outside anyhow).
This is great for occasional users to check anywhere that they haven't left a stray instance running, especially if they start them via scripts. I, of course, have totally discovered that only after getting the bill a week and a half later...
i've been a big proponent of aws in general and ec2 in specific. this move by amazon just underlines their willingness to broaden their products appeal. and broaden ec2's appeal it will. frankly, a majority of people who read this site know how to get ec2 running via a command line. however, if for no other reason than showing your non-tech clients how ec2 functions graphically, this is an obvious win to the non tech among us.
go amazon! great job. (yaya ec2 web gui exists already - but its not directly from amazon so you lose a bunch of people in translation)
JQuery is a pleasure to use for general UI manipulation, but (to my mind) it just doesn't have the consistency and quality of YUI when it comes to UI widgets / framework. And honestly, it will always be hard for a framework developed as plugins by a diverse group of people to compete in this regard with a full stack framework where every single widget is developed by a crowd of people under the same roof - you get the same look and feel to exacting standards with features most of us don't even want to think about built in (eg: ARIA etc.).
Why not use YUI for doing general ajax work? Well, it's API is horribly verbose, to borrow a term from Zed Shaw, it's "autistic". I can't imagine why they really thought it was a good idea to make it that way but they did. So combining the two makes a lot of sense to me.
The learning curve is now reduced to a level where normal people can figure out how to use AWS in under an hour.