AWS Management Console
AWS Management Console is the web-based console for Amazon Web Services, offering a user-friendly, intuitive graphical interface with wizards and per-service consoles for managing AWS cloud resources. It is the first thing a user sees after signing in, and it provides a Search box for finding services by name, a Services menu listing recently visited and all available services (such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and AWS CloudFormation), and a Regions selector for choosing which AWS Region to work in. A companion Console Mobile App is available for Android and iOS.
Key points
- The first screen shown after a user signs in; provides access to every other service console and a general UI for exploring AWS.
- Unified Search box on the navigation bar (keyboard shortcut Alt+S / Option+S) — locates not just AWS services and features by name but also AWS Marketplace products, AWS blogs, knowledge articles, events, and documentation, without leaving the console.
- Services menu — lets users pick a service from a Recently visited list or the full All services list, organized by category (Compute, Storage, Database, Management & Governance, Machine Learning, Networking, and more).
- Regions selector — on the navigation bar, lets a user switch between AWS Regions (e.g. US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Europe (Frankfurt)) to manage resources in that Region.
- A dedicated Console Mobile App is available for Android and iOS, so resources can be checked and managed on the go.
- The console’s service and Region catalogs span every major category — compute, storage, databases, networking, machine learning, and dozens of others — the console screenshots list far more entries than are useful to enumerate here.
- Console Home can be customized with widgets (Recently visited, AWS Health, Trusted Advisor, and more) in addition to the Search box, Services menu, and Regions selector.
- AWS CloudShell is a browser-based, pre-authenticated shell that can be launched directly from the console for CLI access without local setup.
- Distinct from the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and AWS SDKs: the console requires manual, point-and-click interaction and isn’t suited to scripting or programmatic automation of AWS services.
- Amazon Q Developer is now integrated directly into the console as a chat panel — it can answer questions about the account’s actual resources and costs, diagnose common console errors, and connect to AWS Support.