RedMallorca LAB|Blog LAB para pruebas

This is a companion post to my earlier post -- Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Bring Us Your Data. In the other post you can read about the features of EBS. This post goes into more detail on the tool and library support that has been built by our community of third-party developers.

Here are some tools:

• The RightScale Dashboard includes complete support for EBS. RightScale founder Thorsten von Eicken has written a pair of posts to accompany the release: Why
  Amazon's Elastic Block Store Matters and Amazon's Elastic Block Store
  Explained. They've also got some good background information and tutorials.
• Ylastic supports EBS; more info can be found on their features page, in their blog post, or in the screencast.
• Cloud Studio also supports EBS. You can see the features in action in the video.
• Our own JavaScript scratchpad has been updated. You can use the scratchpad to create and make calls to the EC2 API.

And some libraries (some of the third parties will finalize their support in a day or two):

• Perl - Net::Amazon::EC2, Amazon EC2 Perl Library.
• Java - Typica, Amazon EC2 Java Library.
• Python - Boto.
• C# - Amazon EC2 C# Library.
• VB.Net - Amazon EC2 VB.Net Library.
• PHP - Amazon EC2 PHP Library.

-- Jeff;

PS -  I'll be updating this post a couple of times in the wake of the EBS launch so come back again soon.

Andras wrote to tell me about Jollat, a new graphical cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) management client for Amazon EC2 and S3. Available for free download (with a purchase option), the client includes a number of interesting features.

On the S3 side, Jollat handles bucket creation in both the US and EU zones, upload and download of multiple files, log file configuration and management, and an access control list (ACL) editor.

On the EC2 side, Jollat's image manager makes it easy to find and launch any AMI (Amazon Machine Image). Once launched, instances can be accessed using an embedded SSH client. The tool also manages availability zones, IP addresses, and key pairs.

You can see Jollat in action by watching the video.

-- Jeff;

By now many of you are aware that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fully supported by Red Hat on Amazon EC2. You can read more about the offering at http://www.redhat.com/solutions/cloud/. Jeff Barr blogged about this in November, 2007 (aws.typepad.com/aws/2007/11/red-hat-enterpr.html).

I’m posting this from Boston, where I am attending the Red Hat Global Summit -- more specifically helping with a hands-on lab that teaches developers and IT staff how to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Amazon EC2. (It's really easy.) It’s been fun to meet enterprise developers from all over the world, and surprising to find out that no matter what country the developer is in awareness about Cloud Computing is high.

JBoss
Perhaps you already saw the posts in other blogs… Red Hat announced that their JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is available in beta form as a service within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Traditionally we think of Java application servers as building blocks that live in a hallowed enterprise data center; however with this announcement yet another one of those essential technologies is running fully supported by the vendor in the Cloud. In mission-critical applications support is essential--and for Red Hat products that means 24x7 operational support plus developer support. See www.redhat.com/support/policy/sla/production for a menu of offerings to choose from.

This is all quite amazing. Just over two years ago Amazon Simple Storage Service launched, followed in August of 2006 by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. In the short span of time since 2006 we’ve seen Cloud Computing grow from an idea to “of course we use it” for many organizations. With the advent of powerhouse enterprise infrastructure and applications, it seems inevitable that line-of-business applications in the cloud will become commonplace.

Getting started is easy, with just three steps:

1. Sign up for Amazon EC2
2. Purchase a subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Amazon EC2 or purchase a subscription to JBoss on Amazon EC2
3. Deploy your applications on the newly-minted application server; then optionally make a custom AMI from this image and save it as your own private version in Amazon S3.

You can learn more at aws.amazon.com/partners/redhat.

Mike

Many people have told me that they have used the ElasticFox extension for Firefox to get started with Amazon EC2. ElasticFox makes it easy to see the list of available AMIs (Amazon Machine Images), to launch any number of instances of those AMIs, and to monitor and manage the running instances:

We just released version 1.4 of this powerful tool. In addition to wiping out some bugs related to security groups and key management, ElasticFox now supports all of the features of the newest version of the EC2 API - Availability Zones, Elastic IPs, and user-selectable kernels. There are new tabs for kernels and ramdisks, Elastic IPs, and Availability Zones:

An IP address can be allocated and then attached to a running EC2 instance with a couple of clicks:

New instances can be launched in any availability zone, with full control of the kernel (AKI) and ramdisk (ARI):

Finally, you can now filter the AMI list using the box at the top right:

I added this feature myself because I had been spending too much time scrolling through the ever-expanding list of available AMIs during my conference and user group demos.

And that brings me to my last point: ElasticFox is an open source project hosted on SourceForge. It was easy to download the code to my desktop machine (I used TortoiseSVN), install FireBug, figure out how the code worked, and to make and test my changes.

We've got ideas for even more features, but there's no reason to wait for us. If you have some ideas of your own, grab the code, do your thing, and send us your code for review and checkin.

-- Jeff;

PS - We are planning to release a version of this extension which is compatible with version 3 of Firefox. This version is well under way, but we didn't want to hold up release of these great new features in anticipation of the production release of Firefox 3.

Update: If you are brave and somewhat fault-tolerant, you can download and try out the Firefox 3 version here. This version is reportedly faster, and also more responsive -- the UI doesn't freeze when the extension makes background calls to EC2. Please file bugs as you find them (you will need a SourceForge account in order to do so).