ec2-spot-instance-launcher

This is a Python script that brings up a spot EC2 instance (of a specified type, region and maximimum bid), and tags it. It also allows to list and stop active instances.

Prerequisites

Python 2.6 (ish)
Boto library

Configuration

A template configuration file is provided in ec2-spot-instance-launcher.cfg.defaults (rename it to ec2-spot-instance-launcher.cfg).

These are some important parameters:

ami Unfortunately you will need to manually find the AMI to use in your region
key_pair You will need a named keypair on EC2 for instance creation
security_group Ditto
tag A tag that will be used by the script to identify the instance's purpose
user_data User data be passed by the script to instance
user_data_file User data file would be used if user_data is not set. Script would read the file content, and pass the same to instance as user-data

Some thoughts

IAM user needs to have access to a number of EC2 API calls, I believe they are:

DescribeInstances
DescribeSpotPriceHistoryRequest
DescribeSpotInstanceRequests
RequestSpotInstances

The script is written in a fairly platform agnostic way but it's only been tested on Mac OSX.

Expected behavior

First connect should go something like:

python main.py
Spot price is 0.02... below maximum bid, continuing
Spot request created, status: open
Waiting for instance to be provisioned (usually takes 1m to be reviewed, another 2m to be fulfilled) ...  . . . Instance is active.
Tagging instance... Done.
Waiting for server to come up ... . . . . Server is up!

Subsequent connects:

python main.py
Instance exists already, we will not be provisioning another one
Waiting for server to come up ... Server is up!

Terminating (and detagging) the instance:

python main.py stop
Terminating i-0a1b1930 ... done.

Credits