You know something is hot when everyone you talk to all of sudden is asking you if you've ever heard of EC2. Then, if you're like me, and track, test, and use things like EC2 for a living you also get the hint when you start to see several meta services popping up that utilize the underlying service even non-technical people have started to ask about. Well, most everyone would know that Amazon has a popular hit on their hand with EC2 but maybe not everyone has seen some of the leading meta services that have been developed to work with or in conjunction with it. There are only so many hours in the day so I haven't gotten to use each of these yet. But, the all seem well worth checking out and all have their own nuances. I'd love to hear from anyone that is using their services and products for some other hands on experiences and opinions.
WeoCeo
http://weoceo.weogeo.com
I've been following AWS since the beginning. Tonight, thanks to an article over at TechCrunch I found this very cool service for self-load-balancing self-scaling web services. This seems to have tremendous potential for a variety of purposes. But, I haven't actually tried it myself yet. So, I can't say much more for now other than I look forward to spending some time doing so very soon.
You can see a decent screencast for WeoGeo here:
http://weoceo.weogeo.com/video/
RightScale
http://www.rightscale.com
I've recently written a bit about RightScale MySQL database failover recovery. RightScale is a management service with some very clever tools used to help you reliably run your web services on Amazon EC2. Additionally, the RightScale images for FC6 and CentOS5 are excellent bases for building your own AMI's because they are very well documented and the bundler tools make it very easy.
You can sign up on their site for a free developer account and try much of the services out easily. It's quite a nice usable interface overall and makes working with EC2 much more enjoyable. Add to that some of the more advanced stuff they are doing w/ master-slave setups and auto-scaling and it's really worth paying some attention to what they are doing. Finally, their blog is excellent. Overall, I really like what they are up to at RightScale. Clearly some smart folks.
Enomalism
http://www.enomalism.com/features/elastic-computing-platform/
I checked this one out some months ago and decided to pay it another visit later. They had great ideas but it seemed to be not quite ready. Well, until I actually try it for myself I still can't say for sure if it's ready for prime time. Enomalism is different in that it's an overall management tool for Virtual machines instances. It also is designed in part (via add-on) to allow you to sort of be your own EC2 if you want to buy the hardware. So, in essence, it's a Xen management platform but with a twist or two. One of the more interesting things is being able to migrate your local Xen DomU's to Amazon AMI's on the fly. That has some really nice possibilities. They have a long list of things they are doing on their site, to long to list here, and it's worth a visit there.