AWS Management Console Improvements – Tablet and Mobile Support

Managing your AWS resources has become easier and more direct over the years! Let’s do a quick recap before we dig in:

• We launched Amazon SQS (2004) and Amazon S3 (2006) as pure APIs, with no tool support whatsoever. Developers were quick to build all sorts of interesting tools around the web service APIs.
• Later in 2006, we introduced Amazon EC2, this time with a set of command-line tools.
• Sometime in 2007 we entered the visual, browser-based era with the release of ElasticFox.
• In early 2009 we released the AWS Management Console and have focused our development efforts there ever since that launch.

Over the years we’ve made many incremental improvements to the AWS Management Console. We’ve also improved the overall look and feel a couple of times. The goal remains unchanged – to provide you with a clean and efficient way to see and manage your AWS resources.

Today we are ready to take another step forward. We’re making some big improvements to the existing Console, and we’re also introducing a brand-new Console App for Android devices. In this post I’ll give you a visual tour of both applications..

AWS Management Console Improvements
We heard your feedback that the growing number of services in the Management Console (21 and counting), increased service functionality, and new form factors such as tablets, required an update to our designs. Our focus is to make AWS easier to use by increasing customizability and improving information display on your screen of choice.

We started with a focus on customization to make the Console work better for you. We moved Region selection into the Consoles navigation and made it work seamlessly across all of the services. You can also customize the Console navigation with shortcuts to the AWS services that you use the most often:

We learned that many Console users spent a lot of time alternately selecting one of a pair of AWS resources in order to compare and contrast certain settings. This wasn’t a good use of your time, so we added inline resource summaries to give you quick access to key resource attributes.

We then reviewed the Console’s information management and display features to improve readability and to put your information front and center. We learned that monitoring resource statistics is one of the most frequent actions and users wanted more space to view graphs. The new Monitoring View makes it easier for you to see statistics for your resources. You can easily filter your resources and hit the new Select All button to see stacked graphs for your resources. You can even change this view to see all the graphs or individual large graphs on one screen.

We also learned that many users wanted as much space as possible for table information. To accommodate this, we added a collapse option to the side navigation pane and moved the table details to let the table fill the screen.

Expanded

Collapsed

Finally, we know that many of you use (or would like to use) the Console from your tablet device, so we now support endless scrolling within the current page. Your resources are just a swipe away! We also optimized the use of horizontal and vertical space and made the buttons and selectors large enough to ensure easy access.

These improvements will be rolled out across the AWS services on slightly different schedules. We look forward to your feedback on these new designs!

AWS Management Console App
This new app provides mobile-relevant tasks that are a good companion to the full web experience including the ability to quickly and easily view and manage your existing EC2 instances and CloudWatch alarms from your Android phone. You can view your total AWS service charges and switch between AWS accounts and regions from within the app. As with the web-based management console, sign-in is as simple as entering your AWS or IAM credentials.

You can:

• View a summary of your EC2 instances, CloudWatch alarms, total service charges, and the AWS Service Health status, with optional filtering on the instances and alarms.
• Look at EC2 instance metrics and status checks to check the state of your environment.
• Stop or reboot your EC2 instances.
• List CloudWatch alarms by state or time.
• View CloudWatch graphs.
• Examine the automated actions configured for each CloudWatch alarm.
• View detailed AWS service health status, including recent AWS service events and notifications.

Here’s a tour:

We plan to add support for additional services very quickly, so stay tuned (and use the app’s feedback function to tell us what you think). We are also planning to support mobile devices running other operating systems.

Download the AWS Management Console for Android and get started today.

By the way, the Management Console team is hiring! If youre interested in building web or mobile user interfaces, check out our open positions:

• Software Development Engineer, AWS Management Console
• Senior Mobile Developer, AWS Management Console

— Jeff;