Purpose:

• start one or more Amazon instances;
• configure each started instance;
• run some code, using access to the instances via SSH;
• terminate the instances

To show usage help:

aws-starter -h

To start instances:

aws-starter [options] config_path

Positional arguments:

• config_path - Path to configuration file.

Optional arguments:

• -h, --help - Show this help message and exit.
• -p, --pause - Wait until user press the ENTER key after the super script and before termination of the instances. In case of an error no pause will be made.
• --pause-on-error - Wait until user press the ENTER key before termination of the instances when an error occurs.
• --no-terminate - Do not terminate the instances after the work is done. The instances WILL be terminated when an error occurs.
• --no-terminate-on-error - Do not terminate the instances after an error has been occured. This is useful to make able the user to investigate the problem on the instances.
• --stop - do not start any instances. Read instance IDs from a local file, defined in a 'instance_ids_path' configuration option, terminate them all and exit. See description of 'instance_ids_path' configuration option for more details;
• -v VERBOSITY, --verbosity VERBOSITY - Verbosity level. Default is "info". Possible values are: "debug", "info", "warning", "error", "critical".

Each instance started with aws-starter have the following features:

• instance_initiated_shutdown_behaviour option is set to terminate which means the instance will be terminated after a shutdown initiated within the instance (i.e. by poweroff command line tool);
• a set of standard tags will be set, e.g.
  • Name - instance name defined in the aws-starter.cfg file;
  • StartedBy - effective user name and short hostname where the aws-starter tool was launched;
  • StarterProg - 'aws-starter';
  • StarterHost - uname -a string.