AWS Management Console Bookmarking

We've added a new bookmarking feature to the AWS Management Console. You can now construct a URL that will open the console with a specific AMI (Amazon Machine Image) or CloudFormation Template selected and ready to launch.

EC2 AMI Launch
The URL to open up the console with a particular AMI selected looks like this:

https://console.aws.amazon.com	References the console
/ec2/home	Specifies the EC2 tab
?region=us-west-1	Specifies the region
#launchAmi=ami-3bc9997e	Specifies the AMI

If you create AMIs and share them with others, this is an easy way to pass references around so that they can be launched with ease. When the link is activated the console will start as follows (prompting for email address and password if necessary):

The developers at BitNami have already made use of this feature to link directly to their AMIs. For example, here's their page of Magento AMIs:

Ubuntu AMIs are also available with a click:

The Cloud Market also supports this new feature.

CloudFormation Stack Create
The URL to open up the console to the CloudFormation tab with a particular template selected looks like this:

https://console.aws.amazon.com	References the console
/cloudformation/home	Specifies the CloudFormation tab
?region=us-east-1	Specifies the region
#cstack=	Specifies that stack information follows
sn~PHPSample	Sets the name of the stack
turl~https://s3.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-templates-us-east-1/PHPHelloWorld-1.0.0.template	Specifies the link to the template

In this case the console will appear as follows:

We have used this new bookmarking feature to set up a directory of CloudFormation Sample Templates. You can browse the directory, find the desired template, and then initiate the stack creation process with a single click.

The Console team is interested in your suggestions for additional types of bookmarks. Please feel free to leave comments to this post and I'll pass them along.

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Luke]

Love that you can have a bookmark directly to an AMI - well done ec2!

[Niall]

I am not sure what scenarios this would be useful for but I think it would have been good if the url didn’t reference the ami directly.

Instead there could have been a way of storing what ami links to some new tag on the url e.g.

#launchAmi=Dev1

In the background the main AWS admin person could map Dev1 to a certain ami and then in the future when inevitably Dev1 uses a new ami you won't have to re-issue a new url.

[Daniel]

Sweet! This is something we have requested multiple times in the past. Working on adding support for it on BitNami.

[Daniel]

Ok, support added for all stacks! Example here http://bit.ly/fnoFO3

Thanks for adding this, it is a small feature we have been asking forever :)

[Sankarn]

Here goes a basic approach, A Cost Calculator for Live Videostreaming using Amazon CloudFront CDN. It can be downloaded from
http://bit.ly/gtDFR6

[Gilad]

How about this feature: a 'reference back' parameter on the bookmark URL; once AWS finish running the AWS launch wizard, AWS opens the refernced browser window.

This would allow us to integrate the Amazon wizard smoothly were we need it.

Comments? Is there a way of doing this already?

[smoser]

I've just updated the Ubuntu images pages to use this. Thank you.
http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/lucid/release/

[TheCloudMarket]

We've added support to launch all the EC2 images from our indexed pages

For example
http://thecloudmarket.com/image/ami-ee48af87

Thanks!