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Automating some AWS tasks

Managing and monitoring EC2 instances with the AWS console in browser is easy, but can involve a lot of clicking. Sometimes a command line is simply more efficient. The AWS CLI is great for managing EC2 instances and other stuff, but it can be annoying as most things need instance ids rather than human-friendly names. I've implemented some tools to simplify this by allowing me to reference things by their name.

These tools are implemented in Python, using boto3 and can be found on Github: https://github.com/ccpgames/aws-tools

Running bots for load testing is one example of a task where automation helps a great deal. I have scripts to create a number of machines, upload a tarball, extracting its contents and running a command. Once the command finishes the machines can be terminated.

I'm sometimes juggling a fair number of machines, and while each running instance is fairly cheap, things can add up, especially if I leave machines running idle just because I forgot to stop (or terminate) them. The list-machines script shows me a quick overview of all machines on my account.

I'll be adding tools to this collection as the need arises - feedback and contributions are welcome!
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