A picture is worth a thousand words - how about if you could visualize your EC2 infrastructure automagically?

That’s what Cloudily does:

It discovers connections between hosts using a variety of tools: arp, netstat and last.

Find me on github or pypi.

The problem

Booting instances on EC2 is easy. But once it comes to connecting to them, you end up having to copy around transient and unwieldy ec2-....compute.amazonaws.com host names.

So you manually set up a CNAME in your DNS to give the instance a friendly name, but as soon as you stop and restart the instance, the ec2 name has changed so your DNS record needs updating.

Rapidly gets tedious!

Just opensourced a starcluster plugin for provisioning elasticsearch clusters automatically in the cloud.

What is Starcluster?

Starcluster is great for spinning up clusters of ec2 nodes quickly for some analytics / data chomping.

If you’re not familiar take a look at this very cool screencast:

Starcluster and Elasticsearch = best friends

Elasticsearch is a great fit - it runs smoothly on ec2 and for ease of searching big data is second to none.