Managing AWS: Use Boto to Create And Destroy Instances

Today in class you learned about boto, the official Python wrapper for the Amazon AWS Services SDK.

Tasks

Using what you learned today in our class demo, take the following steps:

  • Create a virtualenv and project for learning Amazon Web Services deployment. Call it awsenv (or something like that)
  • Once the environment is generated, use pip to install the Python AWS SDK package boto3.
  • Once boto is installed, read this for information on safely configuring boto to use your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key credentials
  • Find a reasonable ami to use in creating your instance. May I suggest the ubuntu instance finder on this page to get an excellent generic Ubuntu image?
  • Then, walk through the steps in this introduction to practice creating and destroying EC2 Instances

Submitting Your Work

To submit this assignment, take a screen shot of your AWS EC2 console showing an instance you’ve created via the command line in a running state.

As usual, use the comment feature to add any questions, concerns or reflections you may have on what you did here.

Please keep in mind that to stay in the Free Usage Tier for Amazon AWS, you may only create t1.micro or t2.micro instances, and you may only have one running at a time.