In October 2008 Amazon finally declared its Xen-based Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) ready for production, introducing a Service Level Agreement, the availability for 32 and 64bit Windows Server 2003 virtual machines, and the support for IIS and SQL Server inside each guest OS.
At that time the company also hinted at a new management console that customers could use to manage their virtual infrastructure in the cloud, but the product remained unveiled until last week.
Simply dubbed Web-based AWS Management Console, the product is a feature-rich control panel that allows to create, launch, find and manage virtual machines (called Amazon Machine Images or AMIs), create and manage volumes and snapshots (called Elastic Block Store or EBS), and even manage the security permissions and the firewall settings.
The product is still in beta but its AJAX interface seems pretty valid and Amazon seems to have created an interface even better than the popular Elasticfox extension for Firefox:
Amazon published a nice webcast about the new console here.