Optimize Your AWS Console Experience
Free tool saves you time if you work with the AWS console
No matter how much we love infrastructure-as-code, it’s inevitable that all active AWS users spend a significant amount of time with the console. Moreover, it’s a rare practitioner that accesses just one or two services within the console. That’s just not how AWS works. They provide many dozens of services (see How Many AWS Services Are There) so that we can compose complex solutions from a rich variety of powerful building blocks. Consequently, real solutions cause us to flip between many different AWS service consoles. If we work across multiple accounts, now a common practice, then the complexity is even greater.
The resulting browser/tab sprawl is not an insignificant issue. As we work to build and debug solutions and attack operational issues, we need to quickly sort through vast amounts of information not just from AWS consoles, but also from IDEs, cloud management tools, technical documentation, search results and more. Spending time searching for tabs, opening new console pages and waiting for page loads adds up costing time and breaking our train of thought. We really need a better way.
Did you ever wonder how much time is saved by using typing completion? It seems small when typing one line, but it adds up. Would you go back and turn off typing completion? Saving time managing console switching is much the same. I’ll show you simple and small optimizations, that once you use, you’ll not want to go back.
First let’s recap our current options to better manage the AWS console experience and then show how Cloud Pegboard (a free tool) can significantly simplify and optimize the experience.
Using the AWS console we work with multiple services and multiple accounts. To work with multiple services, you can use the Services menu to view or search the entire list of 161 (and growing at 18%/year) services with consoles (including a 6-deep history), or use the “one-click navigation shortcuts” on the nav bar. One-click navigation shortcuts let you create pinned shortcuts to services’ consoles on the top nav bar of the the AWS console. This is a great feature that I’ve used forever.
If you are unfamiliar, just click on the thumbtack icon on the console and set up shortcuts to your most frequently accessed services.
To work with multiple accounts, we can use the Switch Role feature. If you are working with multiple accounts and haven’t set this up, you should definitely consider it (it won’t work for all situations depending on your how your organization manages accounts). Alternatively, or in addition, you can open up a new browser in private browsing mode so that you can be authenticated to multiple accounts at the same time. You can also open different browsers since they don’t share cookies. [I’m omitting an SSO discussion here since that’s a centrally managed solution and not typically under your control.]
Challenges
As useful as these shortcuts are, they have a number of shortcomings as summarized below.
One-click navigation shortcuts limitations
- Limited list size. There’s only a limited number that can fit on the nav bar depending on your typical screen width. This means that often the services you need won’t be listed and you’ll need to search for them fresh in the Services menu.
- Single fixed list. Most of us work on multiple projects or systems that use different sets of services. Therefore, a fixed list of say 6–8 pinned services is one size that likely won’t fit all needs.
- Cookie dependency. If you ever clear cookies then, you’ll need to recreate all your navigation shortcuts.
- No private browsing. If you every use private browsing (as you might if you are working with multiple accounts), then you will not have your shortcuts since they are stored as cookies.
Limitations common to Services console and One-click navigation
- Opens in current tab. When you click on a console link, the current window is changed instead of opening a new window. If you want to open in a different target, you need to explicitly control/command-click.
- Opens duplicates. And if you do control-click, you will always open a new version even if you already had a console open for that service. This results in duplicate tabs for the same service (sometimes displaying different states).
- Always reloads page. And to add insult to injury, each load is a fresh page load which isn’t always that speedy (often ~2–4 seconds or more) depending on which service you are opening.
- Tab hunting. When you do have a set of tabs open for the services that you are working with, it can be hard/slow to find the right one.
A delightful resolution
Cloud Pegboard is a free service with a mission to help AWS users better manage the large and rapidly growing amount of information that AWS users need to do their jobs. It provides user-centric ways of finding AWS information much faster and then keeping up with changes.
Among its features is a data sheet dashboard view that lets you view a single page data sheet for each AWS service. By providing one-click access to all of the information for a service in a consistent and comprehensive view, you spend far less time searching for information and can continue with your design, development, and operations activities without task switching to search for data.
While data sheets are immensely powerful in their own right, for today’s discussion, I’ll focus on the dashboard that resides on top of the data sheets view. This dashboard view solves all of the challenges outlined above. From the dashboard, you can instantly open or switch to the AWS console for any service in a context-sensitive manner (in addition to giving instant access to the corresponding data sheet)
Here’s a walkthrough for how this works and some recommendations to best utilize its capabilities.
Getting started
- Sign up. Sign up for a free account at CloudPegboard.com.
- Bookmark. Add https://cloudpegboard.com/dashboard as a bookmark on your bookmarks tool bar. This is a small but important step. It’s really easy to fall into old and slow habits if you don’t have really easy access to your starting point.
- Leave dashboard open. Leave the dashboard page open as a window on your desktop (if you have multiple monitors, usually on a secondary monitor). As with the bookmark step, this is surprisingly important. If it’s there you’ll use it and save lots of time and be far more efficient. If you don’t you are far less likely to use it and get the benefit (we’ve actually researched points 2 and 3 even though it is intuitive).
- Create an initial list. To set yourself up for maximum efficiency, you should create a list of services for each of your projects or contexts. You can create these on the fly and update them as you travel. For starters though, just create an initial list with your most common services. Lists persist with your account (not cookies) and therefore will be available from any device and any browser including when in private browsing mode. To create a list, just use the “create list” menu and pick a name. Then use the search field to find services and click the Add button to add a service to the current list. There are other ways of creating lists too (e.g., import from architecture diagrams), but I’ll not cover that here for brevity. You can create as many lists as you like (e.g., one for each project or subsystem or any other grouping that makes sense to you).
- Set default list. If you have a list that you use more often than others at any given time, use the List Actions menu to set it as your default. This way whenever you load the dashboard it is preloaded with presets for your default list of services.
Using the dashboard to supercharge your console access
Now that you’ve got yourself setup (takes just a couple of minutes to do everything above), you are ready to reap the benefits every day that you work with AWS. Here’s how to best make use of the tool.
Click service name to open console. Now that you have the dashboard open, just click on the name of the service under its icon. This will open a new (no need to control-click) tab with the corresponding AWS console. If you click on another service, a different new tab will open for that unique service name.
Now if you click on the name of a service is already open in a tab, the previously opened tab will become immediately active. That is, no duplicate tab will be created and there will be no new 4-second page load.
That’s it!
You get to where you want to go instantly.
Additional tips
Here are a few additional observations about this solution.
Data sheets. In addition to the value of getting to the right console quickly, you also have the ability to view the data sheet instantly too. If you click on the icon for the service, the current view of the data sheet portion of the dashboard instantly switches (no load time) to show the full data sheet for that service. Data sheets give you one-click access to any reference information you need when developing with or operating a service.
Search. If you ever need a service that’s not in your current list you can still search for it (with typing completion). The result of the last 12 searches are cached. Just like a preset, you can click on the name to open the console or the icon to view the data sheet.
Private browsing. If you need to work with multiple accounts where Switch Roles is not set up, then open Cloud Pegboard in each private browser and pick the relevant list. You can also use a different browser type for the same purpose.
Next steps
While there are a lot of capabilities in Cloud Pegboard to help you get the most out of AWS, I’m particular jazzed about this small but very powerful aspect. I’ve been eating my own dog food here and it’s delicious! I hope you try it out and get as giddy about this as as I have. We thrive on feedback. Let me know how this works for you and areas where you still have friction. We’re committed to attacking anything that slows down your access to the tools and information you need to be highly effective and efficient with AWS.
About Cloud Pegboard
Cloud Pegboard helps AWS practitioners be highly effective and efficient even in the face of the tremendous complexity and rate of change of AWS services. We want to keep AWS fun and feel more like dancing in a sprinkler on a hot summer day and less like being blasted with a firehose. We make the AWS information you need amazingly easy to access, and with personalization features, we help you stay up to date on the AWS services and capabilities that are important to you and your specific projects.
