Just checked out the Amazon EC2 console they released today. It’s a fairly full-featured control panel, but it’s missing some things that are necessary to be a useful tool.

1. You can’t assign control to another AWS login ID. This requires everyone to know the account details of your AWS account if you have sysadmins running things. Bad Juju.
2. No way to store any extra information about the instances. You can name security groups, and volumes, but you can’t name an instance.
3. No userdata. In the API, ec2-run-instances -d “your user data here” is almost necessary for any advanced control of your instances at boot time. That part of the API isn’t available in Amazon’s control panel at this time.

Until these issues are resolved, the new console will remain a nice tool to get people started, but won’t ever be a sustainable solution for serious management.