Managing Cloud Services like AWS

Have been a avid user of RightScale Developer service for managing the Amazon AWS services painlessly. Overall have been fairly satisfied with the facility provided.

Recently, started to look out for other options just to manage my risks. Here is what I came up with. I wil not go into the pricing which I will allow others to follow-up on their own as it is largely governed by what one's skills and capabilities are and how much of hand-holding is required.

Scalr - Offers a Open Source installation to manage your own, besides the SaaS model which has a developer version which is free. The added sweet-spot is that I would it supports Spot Instances.

Cloudkick - Seems to be able to manage EC2, Rackspace besides others. Another interesting thing whcih I found there was a python library libcloud which can be considered as another option in its own right except that it is library meaning useful for the developers to build upon. Hence a good option again to look at except that it is in Python, of which I know close to nothing. But maybe ...

Then there is Cloud42, which is totally unknown to me.

Of course then there is Amazon EC2 AWS Management Console and the ElasticFox extension to Firefox.

With this added set of inputs, here are some of the factors whcih came to my mind when evaluating these options.

1. How the server is setup. In teh case of RightScale there is ServerTemplate on which a server can be built from the base AMI. This allows seamless flexibility in setting the new instance type without investing in custom AMIs of your own.
2. Availability of open source tools allow these to be tinkered to one's own satisfaction as well as incorporate these in your own home-bred solution.
3. It would be good to have a feature for an instance to be started outside a service to be visible within the dashboard view of the service. To explain this better, I created a Amazon instance directly using teh AWS Management Console, but was not able to see this within the Rightscale dashboard.

Oh by the way found this really cool-looking app for Decaf, but unfortunately was not able to get it on the ADP.  May has something to do with the paid apps handling in ADP Market. Will need to check further.


By the way after much searching I think the search term which got me best result in Google Search was the  - "ec2 management"

It would be good to know what others feel about these options. Are there other options in the market. Do add those in the comments section.