Controlling an EC2 instance with python

One of the selling points of EC2 is that it enables elastic provisioning of computing infrastructure; this allows following novel usage patterns where a server is used only for the time required to do some work.

The key to reach this flexibility is the API that gives developers the ability to startup a server, configure it, use it and shut it down. There are libraries for many programming languages but I like the way the boto python library makes it really simple do these things (and a lot more).

Here I’ll show how to use boto to start a server instance then how to send a file to the instance and execute a command on the remote server, and finally I’ll show how to terminate the instance.

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Cobol Cloud

Cloudification of IT services will be a growing trend in the coming months, one (big) step forward in this process is the announce today that Microfocus has released a virtualized mainframe environment which will let enterprises run CICS and IMS code in the cloud

The real breakthrough is that this will enable a whole sector within our industry to transition to a modern architecture. There are a lot of ISVs which have invested heavily and have a great knowhow in mainframe technologies and those were facing tough times with clients lending towards web services and cloud systems to renew their IT (this is specially true for many small italian software houses working on ERP systems).

With this offering those ISVs will be able to transition current clients to cloud systems and perhaps they will be able to re-engineer and modernize their software one piece at a time as hopefully the Microfocus service will enable new ways to integrate mainframe software and internet services.

Backup to S3

Here is a small script I’m using to backup files to S3. Actually it implements all the basic operations you need for S3 (bucket creation, listing, file upload and download).

It’s rather trivial but I was able to keep it so simple, thanks to it’s use of the Boto python library to do all of the AWS heavywork. Anyhow I think it may be useful.

A few examples:

Here is the code:

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