Elasticfox

The ElasticFox Firefox extension allows you to tag EC2 instances, EBS volumes, EBS snapshots, Elastic IPs, and AMIs. ElasticFox’s tags are stored locally within Firefox, so if you use ElasticFox from more than one browser your tags from one browser are not visible in any other browser. In this article I demonstrate how to copy tags from one ElasticFox installation to another. Where Are ElasticFox Tags Stored? My article about Tagging EC2 Instances Using Security Groups shows a brief walkthrough of using ElasticFox to tag instances. Under the hood, ElasticFox stores tags in the prefs.js file within your Firefox Profile directory. But instead of poking around in there directly, take a look at Firefox’s built-in interface to these preferences. It’s the about:config screen, and you get there by typing about:config into the address bar: ...

Update September 2010: AWS has added support for tagging instances, volumes, snapshots, and many other EC2 resource types via the API and the AWS Management Console. The techniques described here are no longer necessary. So you have a bunch of instances running in Amazon EC2 and you want to be able to tell them apart easily. The way to do this is to “tag” each instance with a descriptive tag, such as “database”, “web server”, “memcached”, etc. The easy, human-friendly way to tag your instances is to use ElasticFox, and the robust, programming-friendly way is to use Security Groups. ...