Alternative tools for Amazon EC2?

I'm a bit late but I have a solution!

I found the same problems with the Amazon AMI tools. They're a decent reference implementation but very difficult to use particularly when you have more than a couple instances. I wrote a replacement command-line tool as part of another project, called Rudy that answers most of your concerns

The commands are more intuitive than Amazon's AMI tools:

• rudy-ec2 instances -C
• rudy-ec2 groups -A -p 8080 -a 11.22.33.44 group-name
• rudy-ec2 volumes -C -s 100
• rudy-ec2 images
• ...

All configuration is in a single file (~/.rudy/config).

It can output in several formats (yaml, json, csv, tsv, and of course regular text):

rudy-ec2 -f yaml snapshots--- :awsid: snap-2457b24d:progress: 100%:created: "2009-05-08T15:24:17.000Z":volid: vol-4ee10427:status: completed

Regarding the private keys, There are no EC2 tools that allow to create private keys for with a password for booting a public instance because the API doesn't support it. However, if you create your own image, you can use your private keys.

Here's more info:

• GitHub Project
• An introduction to rudy-ec2

ElasticFox is handy for most tasks. They are occasions though that a command line tool will be better suited. I personally use boto library for python. It is very easy to script all the required operations. You can also use it to upload/download files from S3. In general, I would say that a scripting language like Python or RUby, together with a AWS library, is the best solution.

I personally use Tim Kay's Perl command line tools and haven't used original Java based API for quite some time. Excellent for UNIX environment.