CloudFront Management Tool Roundup

Amazon CloudFront was designed to make it really easy to distribute content to users at high speed with low latency. Here are some new tools which provide a nice end-user interface to CloudFront.

The newest Freeware release of the CloudBerry Explorer now includes CloudFront support. You can create and manage distributions, assign CNAMES, and even automate the entire process using the Windows PowerShell. CloudBerry Explorer also includes some powerful support for batched changes to S3 object Access Control Lists. There are a couple of helpful videos here.

 

StreamInCloud is a free FLV (Flash Video) encoder. You simply create an S3 bucket and give StreamInCloud permission to read and write it. It then monitors the bucket for new videos, encodes them into the FLV format, and places the encoded version in the bucket. Of course, if the bucket is part of a CloudFront distribution, the encoded content is then available worldwide at high speed with low latency.

StreamInCloud encodes the videos at 512kbps and leaves the size as-is. This service is free; an advanced version with additional features and options will be available later at an additional charge.

 

Cyberduck is a Mac OS X client for Amazon S3 and CloudFront, with added support for FTP, SFTP, WebDav, and other online storage facilities. The product has a very long feature list, is "scriptable via AppleScript, and, like CloudBerry Explorer, is Freeware.

Full source code is available as well.

 

As I noted earlier this week, Ylastic allows you to manage your CloudFront distributions from your iPhone. There's now support for the Google Android Phone as well. Watch the screencasts to learn more.

 

Affirma Consulting has developed the Manager For Amazon CloudFront in C#. The project is hosted on CodePlex and full source code is available. It supports direct streaming of data into S3 and uses multiple threads to manage simultaneous uploads, downloads, and live statistics.

 

On the surface, CloudBuddy looks like a free S3 bucket explorer tool with full support for CloudFront. However, there's quite a bit more beneath the surface. It is actually a platform with a highly refined architecture. All CloudBuddy operations are exposed as APIs.

The distribution includes a Microsoft Office plug-in to help you to manage your documents, workbooks, emails, presentations, and projects in the cloud. Source code is available.

 

Bucket Explorer also has a number of unique and very handy features including the ability to copy objects from one S3 account to another along with timed backups to S3. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

 

Enjoy, and let us know how you have put CloudFront to use.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Jeffrey McManus]

Has anyone gotten StreamInCloud to work? I made a bucket and uploaded a few video files to it about 24 hours ago...no conversion yet.

[Daniel]

Jeffrey,

Check the ACL on your bucket and videos and make sure encoder@streamincloud.com has read access to the files and read/write access to the bucket. We've discovered a lot of bucket browsers upload files without inheriting the bucket's ACL. Videos are typically processed within the first hour of being uploaded. We're working on a monitor console so you can see the status of each of your videos. Hope that helps!

Daniel

[Bob (Buffone)]

If you are looking to interact with CloudFront, S3, SimpleDB, or Simple Queue Service inside of Eclipse or Aptana, go to
http://www.rockstarapps.com and check out our beta release of Eclipse Plugins.

For details on the tools - check out the product page below:

http://www.rockstarapps.com/joomla-1.5.8/products/amazon-ws-tools.html