Back when the cloud was the story in itself, few people thought about optmizing the tools to navigate and nurture their systems on the cloud. Of course, this was before the mobile applications scene exploded. As AWS cloud deployments increase in capacity and cost optimization becomes increasingly more important, a large moon-launch type static command centre to manage EC2 instances is highly undesirable. There are several mobile apps out there which help cloud managers, support engineers, CTOs and CIOs keep an eye on the cloud.
- The Amazon We Services (AWS) Console (Free on iOS and Android)
- Decaf Amazon EC2 Client for Android ~$14
- Eazy2 (Free on iOS and Android)
1. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Console is certainly a natural choice for anyone using AWS services for managing their EC2 instances, get an idea of how much they’re spending. It tackles the entire range of AWS services everything from CloudFront (Amazon’s Web-hosting service) and Route 53 (Amazon’s Domain Name System Web service), to S3 storage service and Relational Database Services (RDS). The app is free and available on both iOS and Android app stores. The only drawback reported from users is that the app is not native. The user experience is quite poor compared to some others on the list which offer lower functionality, but a vastly superior experience.
2. Decaf Amazon EC2 Client for Android is a paid app and offers most of the features offered by Amazon but with a sleeker native android experience. It doesn’t allow multiple accounts and is limited to managing EC2 instances, however, it does have a password protect feature. This app also lets users play with different regions and certainly a good choice if you’re phone or tablet is used by multiple users. The app is priced at a steep $14 and there is no support for load balancers or network interfaces.
3. Eazy2 like Decaf focusses on managing EC2 instances for AWS cloud. Eazy2 is free to use and available on both iOS and Android. EC2 is built natively on both platforms and offers a simple user interface and a great user experience. The AWS Console does have more functionality but Eazy2 makes up for it’s limited functionality in performance and ease of use. Unlike Decaf Amazon EC2 Client, Eazy2 allows multiple accounts. Users can determine current cost/hours of each running instance(s) and search through instances across all regions. Details of instances such as name, zone, type, owner, etc are clearly visible and Eazy2’s makers have included updates and links to the AWS Blog.
Each of these apps have features that are best in class, and as with everything on the cloud, there is no one size fits all. But one of these three is bound to fulfill your AWS EC2 management needs on your mobile.