Amazon.com released on Thursday a web GUI for AWS: the AWS Management Console.
It's pretty slick, although still clearly a beta - some rough edges around navigation, and EC2 support only (no S3, SQS, Cloudfront, etc. yet). If you're running lots of diverse AMI's, this single view is a great decision making tool. Once they add Tagging (Label and group Amazon EC2 resources with your own custom metadata,) companies will be able to quickly see opportunities for optimization and grouping of operations, etc.
The AWS announcement probably hurts RightScale, but this is their positive spin on it.
This news from Amazon raises the bar on ease of use and the relative importance of self service in the cloud market. Once they've experienced the AWS Management Console or RightScale's dashboard, many enterprises will want their own private clouds to be built with clean UI's and web2.0 ease of use too. While a quality programmatic interface is vital to the scaling needs of cloud users, a simple and useful set of GUI controls is equally important for those primarily seeking the self service benefits of cloud computing.
Entering the market without a comparable console will be a disadvantage for upstart public clouds, but this new prerequisite for clouds also creates an opportunity to up the ante further.
A couple opportunities for value add come to mind:
- Social networking integration - one clear opportunity is to enhance cloud console functionality with existing social networks. Imagine a 37Signals interface that let's you plot the sequence of operations required to upgrade your complex app running across 1000 instances in Basecamp, a message to Twitter followers when specific operations complete, and a Livejournal post summarizing the status of the upgrade after completion - a social RESTful SOA for datacenter operations if you will.
- Modeling and Design tools - I expect companies like Smugmug wont use the AWS Dashboard and Control Panel features as is, but would use a GUI that could help model different deployment patterns and quickly sort through sequencing and dependency issues and compare performance characteristics of alternative architectures. (If you haven't read how Smugmug uses EC2 for their Skynet, check out Don MacAskill's post on it. A modeling tool might give Don a way to compare an SQS implementation with his home grown solution, and make a decision informed with real financial and performance inputs.)
Other Cloud Computing news for the week ending 10-Jan-09:
