What are the must have tools for Amazon Cloud development?

Question

What tools do you consider essential when developing for the Amazon cloud? This could be any 3rd party (paid or open source) tool, or library when targeting the cloud.

Amazon EC2 (Compute Service)
Amazon S3 (Storage Service)
Amazon Simple DB
Amazon Relational Database Service

Answer 1

It depends what kind of instance you are using. I can only answer on linux.

1. VMWare or something that lets you use Virtual Machines (or an extra ec2 instance)
2. Source control (I use git)
3. SSH (checkout how to tunnel ports through ssh if you don't want to expose them on the public machine)

Start with a clean linux image and create an exact copy as a local VM. Make sure any changes to the production environment are also changed in the VM.

I test on the local VM and then push my changes to github.

The final step is pull latest version from github.

Answer 2

ElasticFox plug-in for FireFox- Unless you just love working from the command line.

Answer 3

CloudBerry Explorer freeware http://s3.cloudberrylab.com/ fully functional Amazan S3 and CloudFront desktop client.

Answer 4

For me, RightScale is absolutely indispensable. It lets you manage every aspect of your AWS services, from EC2 to SimpleDB to S3 to a bunch of other things that I don't even use. It also lets you create accounts with limited permissions so others can do things like SSH into instances without being able to mess with billing or the like.

Some of their plans cost upwards of $500 per month, but we've just stuck with the free version and it works great.

Answer 5

I find Jets3t to be very useful for S3 operations. You can use both the GUI tool as well as the library programmatically. For EC2, you can use the AWS Java SDK.

Note: Both of these are in Java.

Answer 6

Amazon's management tools are enough for basic instance and configuration management, and their command line tools cover all other aspects (and are easily scripted from any language you use). You want to automate most of the repeated actions anyway, and working with the command line tools and libraries prepare you for that.

Answer 7

Here are some Amazon Storage helpers for ASP.NET MVC for S3. The trick is you can use these helpers in any application really... not just web

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/delay/archive/2011/01/13/there-s-a-blob-on-your-web-page-but-don-t-wipe-it-off-new-delay-web-helpers-assembly-brings-easy-amazon-s3-blob-access-to-asp-net-web-sites.aspx