I had to give it a try. This blog is now moved to AWS. There are a lot of cool features but they’re sort of expensive. For example, if I put the database on RDS and memcache on ElasticCache, it will cost me $140/mo. Come on, running yum -y install memcached is not worth $50 a month!
Actually, all of this blog can fit into a single instance and I can enjoy the free usage tier, hopefully.
Being a cli-head, I gotta have some tool that doesn’t require a dozen mouse clicks. awscli is exactly what I need. To install it, provided you already have python 2.6 and pip installed:
pip install awscli
Then configure a profile and store the IAM access credential
aws –profile personal configure
Once the IAM credential is configured, I can proceed to doing a lot of things. Here are a few examples to get you started:
aws help
aws –profile personal s3 ls
aws –profile personal ec2 describe-instances
aws –profile personal ec2 describe-snapshots –owner-ids self
From within your instances, one can also query EC2 parameters using the ec2-metadata tool.
wget http://s3.amazonaws.com/ec2metadata/ec2-metadata
ec2-metadata -i -a
instance-id: i-4c24f511
ami-id: ami-baddecff