How are admins managing their EC2 EBS's and Snapshots?

Question

My company is moving our hosting to Amazon and I'm working though all the migration issues. It has been quite a challenge transitioning from physical hardware to transient virtual machines.

One of the last challenges is figuring out how to manage our EBS's and snapshots. Since their is no way currently to name them descriptively or add meaning, I'm wondering how admins are managing their resources. It's not too much of a problem with one or two servers, but how are those running multiple servers handling things. Is everyone using third party tools (like RightScale/Scalr) when they get over a handful of servers? Or are you maintaining wikis or other ancillary documentation?

Answer 1

Short of writing your own tool to index EBS and snapshot IDs against text labels, I've found that using a free RightScale account and assigning nicknames is the best way to manage our EBS volumes and snapshots.

I personally think that the inability to assign an easy-to-remember label to an EC2 instance, AMI or volume is a big hole in the current Amazon offering - it just seems like a no-brainer to me.

Answer 2

I use ElasticFox to manage my snapshots (and all my servers too). It has tagging, which makes it easy to keep track of which one is which.

I also use the boto library when I want to do things programatically. However, if you do that, you'll need to create your own datastore. SQS and Sqlite are good options there.

Answer 3

ElasticFox is surely one of the most convenient tools for (manually) managing EC2. But the key part is - imaging your instances, regularly - set up some automatic initialisation once a new instance is started up: - partition and mount the ephemeral drives - mount the EBS volume once it's available - restore files and databases from either EBS, a shared storage or S3. - start the services (MySQL, Apache, Tomcat, you name it.)

Answer 4

We use chef for managing all of our EC2 resources.

Answer 5

New to the game - hasn't AWS's own web-based Management Console obsoleted things like Elastic Fox?