Networking

Five Apps: Tools to help manage Amazon AWS

By // October 1, 2013, 8:35 AM PST

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  • Manage Amazon AWS

    This gallery is also available as a TechRepublic article.

    As IT professionals, and computer enthusiasts, we throw around a lot of acronyms. Perhaps two of the most popular in the last few years are IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). These are commonly associated with cloud hosting providers, such as Amazon AWS, RackSpace, Windows Azure, and countless others. And while each of these providers offer their own management interfaces, the major players often provide APIs which allows for third party management tools, custom scripting, and other automation.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic


  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: Enstratius 1

    This gallery is also available as a TechRepublic article.

    The dashboard for Enstratius contains some information to help get new users started as well as the ability to monitor Enstratius and Amazon services.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic


  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: Enstratius 2

    Under the Compute menu, Servers lists all active servers in your Amazon AWS environment

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic


  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: Enstratius 3

    Enstratius contains some quick-glance usage statistics on your servers.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic


  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: Enstratius 4

    Enstratius helps administrators monitor and project their system expenditures.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic

  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: Scalr 1

    Scalr is very farm-based.  For demonstrative purposes, Scalr offers a LAMP farm which helps new users understand their software.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic

  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: Scalr 2

    It is also possible to import your existing Amazon servers into Scalr, however it must be done by creating a role based on that server and then re-deploying it as a clone.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic

  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: Scalr 3

    Scalr is very verbose when doing tasks.  This is a listing of the steps taken to build a role from an existing Amazon server.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic

  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: Scalr 4

    Once the role is built, you can use it here to deploy as many clones as you would like.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic


  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: RightScale 1

    RightScale has a customizable Quick Monitoring dashboard on the left menu.  Also, deploying machines is quite easy with the built in server templates.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic

  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: RightScale 2

    In addition to the Quick Monitoring dashboard, full size graphs of nearly every hardware aspect of the server are available within the Monitoring tab of a server’s configuration screen

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic


  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: RightScale 3

    In addition to reporting Amazon costs, RightScale also reports costs from using their management environment.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic

  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: Hybridfox 1

    Hybridfox is a Firefox plugin that provides access to basically as many options as any of the other competitors’ software.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic


  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: Hybridfox 2

    Hybridfox allows admins to customize aspects of its remote management tools, including SSH and RDP.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic


  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: Amazon AWS 1

    Amazon’s Instance list looks similar to the API-based products’ server lists and has all of the same options.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic


  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: Amazon AWS 2

    Monitoring is also available in the Amazon AWS Console.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic


  • Five Apps for Managing Amazon EC2 Systems: Amazon AWS 3

    Most of the server options are found via right-click menu.

    Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic


Manage Amazon AWS

This gallery is also available as a TechRepublic article.

As IT professionals, and computer enthusiasts, we throw around a lot of acronyms. Perhaps two of the most popular in the last few years are IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). These are commonly associated with cloud hosting providers, such as Amazon AWS, RackSpace, Windows Azure, and countless others. And while each of these providers offer their own management interfaces, the major players often provide APIs which allows for third party management tools, custom scripting, and other automation.

Credit: Images by Wally Bahny for TechRepublic


Related Topics:

Networking Amazon Data Centers Storage Hardware Security Virtualization