Yesterday I decided that I would like to create an AWS instance using python. After not very much searching, I came across Boto3 which is the python SDK for AWS and set to work. Being fairly green with both python and using APIs I felt like this was a bit of learning curve, but worth undertaking.

The code for this task is located on GitHub

For testing, I have been using Python 3 and the latest Boto3 build as of the 8/05/2016. If youre using a version of Boto prior to 3, you will most likely find that the details below will not work.

Boto3 can be installed through pip or by cloning the GitHub repo, I chose the GitHub repo. The Installation was very simple, navigate to the directory that you cloned Boto3 into and run python setup.py install. Thats all there is to getting Boto3.

To use Boto3 our script needs to import the modules, this is done by using

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import boto3

After importing the Boto3 module we need to connect to the EC2 region that the instances are to be created on. This is achieved through the below snippet.

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ec2 = boto3.resource('ec2', region_name="ap-southeast-2")

A list of regions with codes can be found here

The first section of code creates a KeyPair to be assigned to the created instances. If using an existing KeyPair, this can be commented out. The request to create a KeyPair returns key_material which is the private key, this is placed as a string into KeyPairOut and saved to a file.

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outfile = open('TestKey.pem','w')
key_pair = ec2.create_key_pair(KeyName='TestKey')
KeyPairOut = str(key_pair.key_material)
outfile.write(KeyPairOut)

The next major code section creates the instances.

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instances = ec2.create_instances(
	ImageId='ami-e0c19f83', 
	MinCount=1, 
	MaxCount=5,
	KeyName="TestKey",
	InstanceType="t2.micro"
)

There are a lot of attributes that can be used when creating and instance, for this task I have tried to keep it as simple as possible.

ImageID: This specifies the instance we want to create. In this case, we will create a RHEL 7.2 instance

MinCount and MaxCount: Specify the number of instances to establish

KeyName: The name of the KeyPair to use. If KeyName is not used then you will not be able to access the instance

InstanceType: The size of the instance to create.

The file section of code provide output to the instance IDs created with the script

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for instance in instances:
    print(instance.id, instance.instance_type)

This is a script that I plan on developing over time, making it more useful and seeing what functionality I can put into it.