Amazon web services EC2

AWS EC2 lets you spin up virtual servers with ease. You can do it from the web interface, but here I show how it can be done using awscli.

Prerequisites

apt install awscli

run aws configure, so that you can authenticate.

~/workspace$ aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [****************GVLA]: 
AWS Secret Access Key [****************TSxC]: 
Default region name [eu-west-1]: 
Default output format [json]: 

You can see the values I passed in

Problems encountered

I first used an availability zone instead of a region, eu-west-1a Vs. eu-west-1
- region and availability zones

~$ ping ec2.eu-west-1a.amazonaws.com
ping: ec2.eu-west-1a.amazonaws.com: Name or service not known

I did not use file:// to specify the filepath to the public key when importing a keypair
- related issue

~$ aws ec2 import-key-pair --key-name "default_key" --public-key-material file://~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
{
    "KeyFingerprint": "fa:a7:a9:ba:94:f7:7f:1d:3b:c2:22:1b:2c:79:0f:a4",
    "KeyName": "default_key"
}

Using awscli to manage virtual machines

I followed the following guide

Running a new instance

I made an EC2 instance through the GUI first, to see what --image-id was available for the free tier, and which --subnet-id to use etc.

~/workspace$ bash -x launch.sh 
+ aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-ca0135b3 --count 1 
--instance-type t2.micro --key-name default_key 
--security-group-ids sg-c36233be --subnet-id subnet-70bd0216
{
    "Groups": [],
    "Instances": [
        {
            "AmiLaunchIndex": 0,
            "ImageId": "ami-ca0135b3",
            "InstanceId": "i-070e1f75ab147c6c8",
            "InstanceType": "t2.micro",
            "KeyName": "default_key",
            "LaunchTime": "2018-06-09T14:02:55.000Z",
            "Monitoring": {
                "State": "disabled"
            },
            "Placement": {
                "AvailabilityZone": "eu-west-1a",
                "GroupName": "",
                "Tenancy": "default"
            },
            ........
        }
    ],
    "OwnerId": "032077489097",
    "ReservationId": "r-0f951329abd7cb1de"
}

Describing instances

Reservations[].Instances[].FieldType notice that you can query for other fields as well.

~/workspace$ bash -x describe.sh 
+ aws ec2 describe-instances --filters Name=instance-type,Values=t2.micro 
--query 'Reservations[].Instances[].InstanceId'
[
    "i-04ae1f2bcf5927707",
    "i-070e1f75ab147c6c8"
]

Terminating

~/workspace$ bash -x terminate.sh i-070e1f75ab147c6c8
+ aws ec2 terminate-instances --instance-ids i-070e1f75ab147c6c8
{
    "TerminatingInstances": [
        {
            "CurrentState": {
                "Code": 32,
                "Name": "shutting-down"
            },
            "InstanceId": "i-070e1f75ab147c6c8",
            "PreviousState": {
                "Code": 16,
                "Name": "running"
            }
        }
    ]
}

Terminated instances will be removed from the console interface after some time.