Downloading the Amazon EC2 Tools

We at Spare Time Notebook have been sleeping on this cloud thing for far too long; not ignoring it per se, just, well, not really needing it.  With the cost of hardware dropping through the floor as of late, its hard to let go of old habits (just buy another box) and embrace the new world.

Those lazy habits end today, as I delve into Amazon's EC2 offering.  I'll be documenting my progress/lessons learned as I go, and since time is tight, will be posting my education in pieces.

Today's effort is about as basic as possible - getting the tools loaded on my development workstation (who knows, maybe someday the math will work and my local workstation will be retired, and instead live in the cloud, only to be spawned when needed).  After a query to the friendly neighborhood google, I had an official link for Setting Up the Amazon EC2 Command Line Interface Tools.  This set of directions had a link to the latest download distribution (currently 1.6.7.2):

The download is fairly small (14meg), and was unzipped into my tools directory like any other java distribution:

I'll spend some time researching the task of building an appropriate command line environment and establishing proper credentials to the Amazon infrastructure and post again after I know what I should be doing.