Ask HN: Best tools for managing AWS? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best tools for managing AWS?

34 pointsjgrahamc15 comments

I'm using both Amazon's own management tool and ElasticFox, but both seem to be lacking professionalism and completeness. Are there other management tools for AWS out there?

View on HN

You're not at all specific about what you think those tools lack. They're both pretty complete, and it's anyone's guess what you think professionalism means.

There's a YC company alternative: https://www.cloudkick.com/

Personally, I've found making my own utilities for AWS to be trivial, so that's what I do.

Beware, I'm heavily command line oriented, YMMV. I rolled my own management code based on Python and some shell scripts. As a database we are using SimpleDB and this is a very nice combination. We have hundreds of machines, this kind of approach is needed because of the scale of operation.

Besides that there is AWS tools which is a single Perl script, powerful enough the replace a lot of EC2 and S3 operation without any other dependency, I'm using that for shell scripts and manual operations: http://timkay.com/aws/

I use a combination of GUI Firefox plugins and Boto, a Python package. Boto works well with Fabric, a Python based deployment tool.

S3cmd is good for syncing files on Cloudfront.

Elasticfox - http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?ex...

Amazon S3 Extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3247

Boto - http://code.google.com/p/boto/

Fabric - http://www.nongnu.org/fab/

S3cmd - http://s3tools.org/s3cmd

We're big fans of RightScale. Their developer version is free and pretty much that's all we use at the initial stages. We use S3, EC2, EBS, Cloudfront, SQS, etc. They have tools for tweaking all of those built-in so it makes life easier. Of course we have our own tools, too, (mostly with boto) but their GUI does come in handy. We manage pretty much all of our EC2 instances through that, with easy image bundling, java SSH consoles, etc.

There are a few other good services/tools out there, but so far I haven't found any as full-featured as RightScale. (But I'm watching this thread for other suggestions, too.)

I wish their upper-tier stuff was less expensive and we'd experiment with it a bit more. Supposedly it's free for companies who are funded through YC, though.

We are trying Scalr (hosted version) right now. It's only been a few days but it has everything we need (dashboard, auto scaling, etc.).

If you do try it, let me know what you think.

http://scalr.net

I tried to use Scalr very early on and it was really poor. But it was also very young. We may give it another shot.

Were you using the hosted version as well?

If you are building apps in ruby there is a high level AWS management platform I built here: http://engineyard.com/solo.

I'm using EngineYard Solo which is a great deal ($25 minimum) and perfect to get up and running quickly. They're also working on tools to help scale applications across multiple instances. I couldn't recommend Solo enough if you're just getting started, it makes working with EC2 a piece of cake.

Cloudkick (they are a YC company) and it is free for now. Their management tools are great and very user friendly.

On the expensive side there is RightScale. They have a lot more tools and good service, but like I said they are a bit pricey.

The development tools I use for AWS are the Amazon Eclipse plugins and the plugins available on Rockstarapps.

http://aws.amazon.com/eclipse/

http://www.rockstarapps.com/

The Amazon tools are good for working with J2EE apps on EC2 and the Rockstarapps tools are good for general application development but don't have EC2 management.

I don't have any idea about that, but I have an idea about Amazon services. When I was a blogger in the EntreCard Community, their services (Amazon) went off more than one time, which causes the website to go down for several hours (about 20 hours) and this happened a lot of times, so I don't think they are a better choice

As a long time AWS user, I doubt Amazon was the problem. They offer a 99% SLA:

http://aws.amazon.com/s3-sla/

I've been with Amazon for months. I've experienced very few problems, and certainly nothing to the extent you describe.

InformaScale's "One Click Datacenter" may be worth considering for new AWS applications. See http://www.informascale.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com