So, in the last couple of weeks I've found a few tools that have made using both Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 a little bit easier.

First, is Jungle Disk, which is less of a tool and more of a way to easily leverage Amazon S3 for storage.  This is an application that when run on Windows allows you to have driver letter access to Amazon S3 storage.  It uses it's own bucket so you can't browse and copy just anything, but the ease of using it is amazing.  It also runs on Mac OSX and Linux.  It includes full encryption, too.

Second is NS3 Manager, which is a graphical browser for your Amazon S3 account.  It also allows for copying of objects to and from your file system.  In this case, any object is support but it doesn't provide drive letter access; you have to go find the object and choose transfer.  It does make creating bucks easy and copying files to them easy, though.  You can then modify the ACLs, too, without having to resort to API calls.  One feature that it could use is a URL generator to easily get the URL to a public object you own.  They are easy enough to figure out, but it's nice to be able to copy'n'paste stuff, y'know?

Finally, we've got a Firefox plugin called EC2 UI that provides an interface for seeing AMIs you have available, starting them, and terminating them. In addition, it provides an interface for managing firewall groups and key pairs. This does a lot of what the command line tools do, but with a nice UI to it all while running in your favorite web browser. ;)

I'm sure I'll be using more as time goes by, but these seemed to be the easiest to get, understand, and use.  Of course, when I get around to doing anything interesting I'll likely be using the APIs directly.

Posted by Shane on March 1, 2007 8:39 AM | Permalink