AWS News Blog

AWS Management Console Bookmarking

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We’ve added a new bookmarking feature to the AWS Management Console. You can now construct a URL that will open the console with a specific AMI (Amazon Machine Image) or CloudFormation Template selected and ready to launch.

EC2 AMI Launch
The URL to open up the console with a particular AMI selected looks like this:

https://console.aws.amazon.com References the console
/ec2/home Specifies the EC2 tab
?region=us-west-1 Specifies the region
#launchAmi=ami-3bc9997e Specifies the AMI

If you create AMIs and share them with others, this is an easy way to pass references around so that they can be launched with ease. When the link is activated the console will start as follows (prompting for email address and password if necessary):

The developers at BitNami have already made use of this feature to link directly to their AMIs. For example, here’s their page of Magento AMIs:

Ubuntu AMIs are also available with a click:

The Cloud Market also supports this new feature.

CloudFormation Stack Create
The URL to open up the console to the CloudFormation tab with a particular template selected looks like this:

https://console.aws.amazon.com References the console
/cloudformation/home Specifies the CloudFormation tab
?region=us-east-1 Specifies the region
#cstack= Specifies that stack information follows
sn~PHPSample Sets the name of the stack
turl~https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-templates-us-east-1/PHPHelloWorld-1.0.0.template Specifies the link to the template

In this case the console will appear as follows:

We have used this new bookmarking feature to set up a directory of CloudFormation Sample Templates. You can browse the directory, find the desired template, and then initiate the stack creation process with a single click.

The Console team is interested in your suggestions for additional types of bookmarks. Please feel free to leave comments to this post and I’ll pass them along.

— Jeff;

 

Modified 10/28/2020 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, expired links in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.
Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr

Jeff Barr is Chief Evangelist for AWS. He started this blog in 2004 and has been writing posts just about non-stop ever since.