Feeling the pressure from Microsoft’s Windows Azure, Amazon works hard on releasing GUI tools for managing their services. Until now, the only GUI way for managing services were a couple of Firefox plugins - Elasticfox for managing EC2 and S3fFox for organizing S3 and CloudFront. However, Amazon just released, in BETA of course, its brand new AWS Management Console, (using Yahoo’s YUI framework, using JSP in the backend).

The initial release of the AWS Management Console provides a graphical user interface for Amazon EC2, with additional Amazon infrastructure services scheduled to be added to the console in the coming months. You can create Elastic Block Store volumes and assign Elastic IP’s to your instances.

The features planned for the future releases look promising: Continue reading…

The tool provides a visual interface to Amazon SimpleDB in the form of a Firefox plugin for querying and updating your Simple DB database domains.

This new tool complements the other visual tools available for managing Amazon services, also provided as Firefox plugin: Elastic Fox - the extension for interacting with Amazon EC2 and S3Fox - Firefox organizer for S3 and CloudFront, helps you organize, manage, and store your files on Amazon S3 and distribute them through CloudFront.

The tool is developed by Bizo, a B2B advertising network running entirely on top of AWS. The code is open source an hosted on github. Read more on the Bizo blog.

CloudFront, the new service from Amazon, will provide you with a high performance way to distribute popular, publicly readable content to your customers all over the world, with low latency and high data transfer rates.

CloudFront was designed to meet the following goals:

• Allow developers and businesses to get started easily, with no dollar or volume commitments. Like other services, this one will be pay-as-you-go.
• Be simple and easy to use. In fact, a single API call is all that’s needed for you to start delivering your content.
• Work seamlessly with Amazon S3, for durable storage of the definitive versions of your content.
• Have a global presence, using edge locations on three continents in order to deliver your content from the most appropriate location

Like all Amazon other services, CloudFront was designed with ease of use in mind from the very beginning.  There are no minimum usage commitments, no monthly fees, and no need to even talk to Amazon. Here’s what you do: Continue reading…