This diploma thesis introduces Cloud42, a management framework for Amazon EC2, allowing to easily manage and monitor EC2 server instances and to exploit the whole power of Cloud Computing.

The Cloud42 web application provides a web-based, rich graphical user interface (GUI) that can be used to monitor and administrate EC2 AMIs and instances.

Apart from the GUI, Cloud42 offers a well-designed Web service interface, thus allowing to invoke all its functionalities from within other applications or even to orchestrate EC2 instances using BPEL processes. Because of the Web service interface, Cloud42 is especially interesting for developers, too.

Beyond the basic functions like starting and stopping instances or managing keypairs, the tool features some enhanced functionalities like transferring files from and to your computing cloud or from an AWS S3 bucket. Furthermore, it is possible to remotely execute arbitrary commands on a running EC2 server instance only by using the GUI or the Web service interface. Due to this remote control, Cloud42 becomes an all-in-one solution, empowering full flexibility.

For instance, there is a notification mechanism that can be used to subscribe any kind of endpoint to event messages sent from EC2 instances according to the publish/subscribe pattern.