Managing Multiple AWS Accounts with the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse

When you’re building the next great application with AWS services, you’ll probably end up with several different AWS accounts. You may have one account for your production application’s resources, another for your development environment, and a couple more for personal testing. It can be really helpful to switch between these various accounts during your development, either to move resources between accounts, to compare configuration values, or to debug a problem that only occurs in one environment.

The AWS Toolkit for Eclipse makes it painless to work with multiple AWS accounts. You can configure the toolkit to store as many different accounts as you like using the toolkit preferences page:

The previous screenshot illustrates configuring each account with a name to help you remember what it’s for, as well as its access credentials. If you’re importing your credentials into Eclipse for the first time, you can follow the links in the preferences dialog box to the credentials page on aws.amazon.com, where you can copy and paste them.

To configure multiple accounts, simply click the “Add account” button and fill in the account’s name and credentials. You can use the drop-down menu to edit the details of any individual account, as well as select the active account the toolkit will use.

Once you have all your accounts configured, you can quickly switch between them using the triangle drop-down menu in the upper-right-hand corner of the AWS Explorer view. It’s easy to miss this menu in Eclipse’s UI, so here’s a screenshot illustrating where to find it. The same drop-down menu also contains a shortcut to the accounts preferences page.

Switching the active account will cause the AWS Explorer view to refresh, showing you the AWS resources for whichever account you select. The active account will also be used for any actions you select from the orange AWS cube menu, such as launching a new Amazon EC2 instance.

How are you using the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse to manage your AWS accounts? Is the interface easy to understand? Does it work well for your use case? Let us know in the comments!