I wrote a shell script that will automate the creation of EC2 instances. Really, all it does is glue together the existing command line tools that Amazon provides in a fairly crude manner. However, it works and it makes my life easier, so I like it. Hopefully it can do the same for you ….

Things You MUST Understand

• Every time you run this script you will be charged for at least one hour’s worth of time by Amazon, even if you shut things down immediately. These aren’t my rules, I have complained about them previously.
• Make sure you use the ec2-terminate-instances script after running this script. If you don’t, you will be charged by Amazon until you shut it down.
• You have to have the EC2 API Tools installed for this script to work.
• You have to have an active EC2 account for this script to work.

Caveats

• This script hasn’t been tested by anyone other than me. It works just fine for me, and I am able to use it on a regular basis. However, if you are looking for a polished, documented, or commercial product then this is the wrong place for you (unless you are willing to pay, of course).
• The script is for UNIX, and was developed under Mac OS X. It may run under Windows with Cygwin, although I haven’t tried (and don’t really want to).
• The script is in Korn. It doesn’t use any particularly odd syntax, so my guess is that it would run under other shells. To be honest I haven’t tried, simply because I use KSH so much with my current work that I am far more efficient with it than any other shell. If anyone wants to test it and/or clean it up to run more universally it would be most appreciated.
• Every time you run this script you will be charged for at least one hour’s worth of time by Amazon. These aren’t my rules, I have complained about them previously.
• Make sure you use the ec2-terminate-instances script after running this script. If you don’t, you will be charged by Amazon until you shut it down.

Licensing

This script is provide it under the MIT license. To summarize, it is provided as-is and can be used free of charge. I am not liable for your screw-ups.

OK, with all that being said, if you still want to use it you can download the script here.

Remember Internet Appliances? I mean products like like Microsoft’s WebTV or Oracle’s NIC? Take a look at this dated rundown of the market or read the press releases about them from Oracle or IBM if you want a good laugh. The IA market failed miserably, ultimately because it couldn’t deliver a significantly better experience than traditional computing, in terms of usability, functionality, or cost. While they did change the market (remember life before the $1000 PC) ultimately they couldn’t bring down costs low enough to compete against either traditional PC’s or embedded systems.

While this is worth discussing just for the schadenfreude, I actually have a reason for talking about this. I was reading a post about running an entire business on SaaS and another switching businesses to a Web 2.0 environment when it hit me like a ton of bricks. Web 2.0 is fulfilling the dream of internet appliances.

A stretch … perhaps. But bear with me. The idea behind IA’s was to provide super simple access to internet services and take away the complications of managing the desktop. Tell me that Google hasn’t taken a quantum leap in that direction with Search, GMail, Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets, and Maps. Tell me that Yahoo hasn’t done the same with Flikr (I don’t use Yahoo much so I don’t know their products as well).

Web 2.0 is effectively turning the computer into an internet appliance where it makes sense, but without sacrificing the advantages of running a fully functioning machine. It is making it possible to actually run a business from the web. This is going to radically change the business environment, at least as much as the transition from the mainframe to the PC. I can’t wait to see how everything will shake out …

Sorry for the time inbetween posts here.  I have been pretty much upside down with some major deadlines with a client that are going to be hitting me for the rest of the year.  However, I am going to try to keep current and keep the information flowing.

Thanks for your patience,

Morgan

Computer World has a new article titled “Gartner: Age, attitude matter in IT“, that raises a lot of the issues that I have been discussing about the changing of the guard in IT and the ensuing culture wars. This has been brewing for a long time, and I think it will be a hot issue in virtually every organization over the next 5-10 years.  Let’s face it, it’s never too late to be a genius, but it’s also never to early to be self-centered.

I just found out the hard way that EC2 does not charge by the number of instance minutes used, but instead by the number of portions of an hour that individual instances use.  Sound the same?  Well, it depends on how you are using it
I wrote a simple shell script that automates the process of creating an ec2 instance.  Not particularly complicated, but I had to run it a number of times until I got it to behave exactly the way I wanted to.  During this time, I was creating instances and shutting them down a few minutes later, so that I could test the program execution and flow.  I needed to do this a number of times, as I was trying to get everything just right.  I tested quite a bit with flat files, although it isn’t quite the same as a live run.

Unfortunately, this is means that for each of these attempts I was being charged for an hour’s worth of time, even though I each time I used less than 5 minutes worth of time.  This is a bit bewildering to me, as in my day job I work in Data Warehousing and I know that it is a relatively simple procedure to summarize the number of instance minutes used before billing the credit card.  So, I feel that I was overcharged by a significant amount, due to a lack of effort.   There have been billing disputes with other internet companies for similar practices, and they ended up in litigation.
To be fair:

1. My entire bill so far has been $4.20, not incredibly high.  Still, I hardly think this hardly fair, considering I probably used less than $0.25 worth of actual time.
2. This policy is spelled out in the AWS terms of service, once you dig in and look for it.  However, billing this way is not intuitive and I think hidden on purpose.

Regardless of legalities, I don’t think this is the right way to do things.  I hope that the folks at AWS will fix this before the beta ends, as it isn’t going to keep customers happy ::sigh::