The following was contributed by the man Himself, Sean Kavanagh.

His awesome work can be found here:

Download: https://github.com/skavanagh/EC2Box/releases

Demo: http://youtu.be/QcvMDjBb4SY

Code: https://github.com/skavanagh/EC2Box

To the great credit of Netflix, they have organized a competition for developers to create new and improve existing tools for the Cloud. My entry, E2Box, enables users to share commands across their EC2 sessions. Commands can be entered in all terminals, one terminal, or a combination of several terminals.

Files can also be uploaded to any of the active terminals.

For some organizations, it is important to track who and what is being done to their systems. This is why you can add accounts to administer your instances.

Since all the SSH communication must pass through the EC2Box web server, the administrator’s command history can be logged and audited.





This could be particularly useful when it comes to private-virtualization (“Private Cloud”). An EC2Box like application, could be used to secure the perimeter network which hosts the instances. Port 22 could be closed from outside the perimeter network, while still allowing limited administrative access to the instances.

I would never see EC2Box as an alternative to NetflixOSS, Puppet, Chef, etc.. It’s just a new way to work with EC2 unhinged! I admit that in many cases “unhinged” is a bad idea, but in some cases it could be just what’s needed. There is always the possibility of using it as a stepping stone until an organization can achieve more advanced virtualization techniques.

Why is it that the subsequent technology is always thought to be the one that is best for the task at hand? Behind all the buzz, the reality is that they are all just tools that do specialized jobs. Pick the right one and hopefully have fun using it!!

A tutorial on getting up an running can be found here.