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Manage your Amazon EC2 instances

Starting Point

In this howto i will show you how to create and manage your Amazon EC2 instances.

Preparation

Register at http://aws.amazon.com/de/
Get your AccessKey and your Secret AccessKey
Create a key-pair and save it to your disk
Create a public key out of your just downloaded private key. You can do this with ssh-keygen -y -f your-aws-private-key.pem

Creating a Rexfile

At first you need to create a Rexfile in a directory of your choice.

$ mkdir amazon
$ cd amazon
$ touch Rexfile

Open the Rexfile in your preferred editor.

Insert the following code in your new Rexfile.

use Rex -feature => ['1.0'];
use Rex::Commands::Cloud;

user "root";
public_key "/path/to/your/just/created/amazon-public.key";
private_key "/path/to/your/just/downloaded/amazon-private-key.pem";

my $access_key        = "your-access-key";
my $secret_access_key = "your-secret-key";

cloud_service "Amazon";
cloud_auth "$access_key", "$secret_access_key";
cloud_region "ec2.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com";

task "create", sub {
    cloud_instance create => {
        image_id => "ami-02103876",
        name     => "static01",
        key      => "dev-test",
    };
};

This task create a new Amazon EC2 instance with no EBS block device.

Create an instance with an EBS block volume

Sometimes you need an instance with a persistent storage volume. To achieve this your can use an EBS block volume.

task "create", sub {
    my $vol_id = cloud_volume create => { size => 1, zone => "eu-west-1a", };
    cloud_instance create => {
        image_id => "ami-02103876",
        name     => "static01",
        key      => "dev-test",
        volume   => $vol_id,
        zone     => "eu-west-1a",
    };
};

Listing Regions and zones

To get a list of all regions and zone you can use the following functions.

task "list", sub {
    print Dumper get_cloud_regions;
    print Dumper get_cloud_availability_zones;
};

List your instances

To get a list of all your instances and volumes you can use these functions.

task "list", sub {
    print Dumper cloud_instance_list;
    print Dumper cloud_volume_list;
};

Destroy your instances / volumes

If you don't need your instances or volumes anymore, you can just destroy them.

task "destroy", sub {
    cloud_volume delete => "$volume_id";
    cloud_instance terminate => "$instance_id";
};

Put all your EC2 instances in a host group

If you have many instances you can easily add them all into a hostgroup.

group ec2 => get_cloud_instances_as_group();

Installing some Software and run Rex

Now we need to add some software to our fresh EC2 instance.

task "prepare",
  group => "ec2",
  sub {
    run "apt-get update";
    install package => "apache2";

    service apache2 => "ensure", "started";

    # deploy your webapp, see Rex::Apache::Deploy for more information.
    deploy "my-site.tar.gz";

    # or upload some files
    file "/etc/passwd", source => "/etc/passwd";

    # do what ever you want
    use Rex::Commands::Iptables;
    close_port "all";
  };

Now you can run Rex to create the instance and prepare the system for use.

$ rex create prepare
[2011-08-06 10:25:58] (5783) - INFO - Running task: create
[2011-08-06 10:26:38] (5783) - INFO - Running task: prepare
[2011-08-06 10:26:38] (5801) - INFO - Connecting to 46.51.135.11 (root)
[2011-08-06 10:27:14] (5801) - INFO - Installing apache2.
[2011-08-06 10:27:30] (5801) - INFO - Uploadling files/index.html -> /var/www/index.html

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