EC2 Firefox Extension is now Open Source

The very cool EC2 Firefox Extension is now an open source project on SourceForge!

The extension makes it really easy to launch and manage Amazon EC2 instances. After creating your keypairs and security groups, you can simply right-click on any of the listed AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) and choose to launch one or more instances.

All of your running instances are listed at the bottom where they can be identified, controlled, monitored, shut down, and so forth. You can easily capture the public DNS name of any running instance, and then paste it into your favorite SSH client (e.g. PuTTY, my personal favorite) to create a secure connection to your new EC2 instance.

There’s also a very cool menu entry labeled “Launch more of these” for instant scalability (assuming, of course that you’ve built your application in a scalable fashion, a subject of another post).

As-is, the extension is pretty cool but as always seems to be the case with something cool, everyone who uses it has ideas for even more cool features. Some people seem to want a slightly less technical view and others want to go in the opposite direction. A lot of people would like to have more control over the list of displayed AMIs.

We’ve released the extension in source form and are now eagerly anticipating the results. The extension is written in JavaScript and you’ll need to know a little bit about CSS and DHTML to be productive.

Let us know what you come up with!

— Jeff;