SDK or a java api is very much needed – especially if you are writing your automation scripts in groovy. We have tried multiple java apis in our scripts including JetS3t and Typica. These apis were really helpful, but they only supported some of the AWS services and were not up to date (for obvious reasons). Having one java api that can support all of AWS technologies was definitely the need of the hour. I am sure Amazon will keep it updated as new services are released. They have the necessary resources to do so.

Furthermore, Amazon has also uploaded the SDK to the maven repository.
You can use the following dependency in your pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.amazonaws</groupId>
    <artifactId>aws-java-sdk</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.002</version>
</dependency>

The java doc for the SDK is hosted at http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSJavaSDK/latest/javadoc/index.html

Amazon has also opened the SDK source code for all. They have mirrored the SDK code repository at github. You can look at the SDK code at http://github.com/amazonwebservices/aws-sdk-for-java

We have found a solution. Ylastic provides an amazing and inexpensive web based interface for various AWS services. It allows you to name your ec2 instances and remembers it. If you have an autoscaling setup it will automatically name your autoscaled instances when they start e.g. webserver001, webserver002 etc.

Ylastic does much more than just naming the servers. It has a very user friendly user interface and also provides an iphone website from which you can start, stop instances etc. It also has a concept of locking an instance so that you don’t accidentally terminate it.

ylastic ec2 instances table

It has nice graphs for cloudwatch data.

ylastic cloudwatch graphs

It supports most of the AWS services such as EC2, RDS, Auto scaling, S3, Simple DB.

ylastic dashboard

It also lets you schedule tasks such as taking a snapshot of your ebs volumes etc. It keep tabs on your instances by receiving alerts when the state of the launched instance changes.

Ylastic costs only $25 per month per Amazon account. It allows you to create multiple users for the same Amazon account. Furthermore ylastic guys are amazingly fast. Their customer service usually comes back with an answer within the first hour. We have hardly had any complaints though. Most of the times we have suggested new features and these people have implemented them in few days.

I totally recommend ylastic. We are very happy with it at Bedrock. It has made our life easier.