RumorMill : Amazon to Launch EC2 Monitoring Dashboard

Lots of news coming out of Amazon Web Services today, between launching Windows support, a new EC2 SLA and taking EC2 out beta they seem to be on roll. (Depending on who you're ask, it's not clear as a friend or foe). It seems Amazon has few more tricks up their sleeve. I've had several independent reports for a few days indicating that AWS is planning on offering a "Monitoring Dashboard" for EC2. The details are fairly scarce but it looks like it may be in direct competition to Rightscale's product offering. One unnamed source said it may look more like the hyperic cloud status website, which is generally pretty useless (Let's hope so, for Rightscales sake), while another said could be a "significant" product release.

I really don't have much details other then what was posted on the AWS blog

Management Console - The management console will simplify the process of configuring and operating your applications in the AWS cloud. You'll be able to get a global picture of your cloud computing environment using a point-and-click web interface.

Load Balancing - The load balancing service will allow you to balance incoming requests and traffic across multiple EC2 instances.

Automatic Scaling - The auto-scaling service will allow you to grow and shrink your usage of EC2 capacity on demand based on application requirements.

Cloud Monitoring - The cloud monitoring service will provide real time, multi-dimensional monitoring of host resources across any number of EC2 instances, with the ability to aggregate operational metrics across instances, Availability Zones, and time slots.

Oh yeah, Rightscale already does most of this. Why not just buy Rightscale or maybe that's the plan?

This is from Rightscale's blog.

Pre-announced monitoring and auto-scaling services

We’re quite excited about Amazon’s pre-announcement of monitoring and auto-scaling services. The details are still quite sketchy through our sources, but all indications are that they’ll integrate very nicely into the RightScale system, giving our customers the choice of using our monitoring system or Amazon’s or both. We’ve been focusing on all the configuration management and dynamic configuration that needs to occur when doing autoscaling, which is much more than just launching instances when the monitoring system says it’s necessary. On top of that, the architecture of the multi-server deployment must be designed to actually support auto-scaling as well as failure tolerance. This is precisely why we offer our customers server templates for popular software stacks with all the hooks for auto-scaling already in place.

All in all, the announcement amounts to two great leaps forward for the cloud computing world: broader OS support and a stronger business commitment for EC2. It seems that cloud solutions get stronger and stronger with each passing quarter. Of course, managing the increasing complexity through design, architecture and automation remains a critical ingredient in this picture — and one that continues to be our main focus at RightScale.

The post seems pretty upbeat considering Amazon has just announced they plan to compete directly with them.