Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has announced the availability of the Web-based AWS Management Console.  In the first release of the Console, Amazon has made a point-and-click interface for their Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) service.  Since Amazon did not have an intuitive way of managing EC2, a number of independent developers created ways to do so.  An example is Elascticfox, a plugin for Mozilla Firefox.

The console allows you to log in to your account using your username and password.  It no longer requires certificates or secret keys.  The point-and-click interface is driven by AJAX.  And on top of that the Amazon web community created Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).  So far about 1200 AMIs have been created.

“That’s quite a menu to choose from—especially if you are a first-time user. The new Launch Instance Wizard walks you through starting your first instance; offering a short list of Linux and Windows server choices,” wrote Mike Culver, Web Services Evangelist of Amazon.com.  “Choose one of these AMIs, and then the wizard even suggests which ports to open in the firewall. It’s smart enough to suggest that you open SSH (port 22) for Linux images, and RDP (port 3389) for Windows instances. The wizard even suggests settings that restrict Amazon EC2 access to ‘your computer only’.”

Other features include Instance Management, Security Group Management, Elastic IP Management, Elastic Block Store, and Key Pair management.

[via AWS Blog]