I wanted a quick way when out and about to easily manage our AWS EC2 instances while out and about. It hasn't happened often, but occasionally I am away from the computer and I need to reboot the instances. Perhaps I remember our developer cluster isn't being used and want to shut it down to save some money.
I didn't find anything simple and free with a quick Google search, so in a about an hour I wrote a nice little Sinatra app that will let me view our instances, shutdown, or reboot any specific instance or all of them. The tiny framework actually turned out to be even more useful as I now have options that let us tail error logs, reboot Apache, reboot mongrel clusters, or execute any common system administration task.
I won't be going into detail on how to build a iPhone webapp using Sinatra and iUI, because Ben already created an excellent post detailing all of those steps. In fact I used his old project as the template when I created this project. I can't begin to explain how amazingly simple it is to build an iPhone webapp using Sinatra, so if you have been thinking of a quick project I highly recommend it.
Here are some screen shots showing the final app. (screenshot courtesy of iPhoney):
 ec2 manager home view. |
 ec2 manager describe instances view. |
ec2 manager instance view.
This app uses the Amazon EC2 API Tools to do all the heavy lifting. So this app assumes that you already have the tools installed and working on the machine you want this app to run on. This normally involves installing the tools and setting up some environment variables like EC2_HOME, so make sure you can run ec2-describe-instances from the machine. After that you should just have to change EC2_HOME in the Sinatra app to match the path where you installed the EC2 tools.
Let me know if you have any issues, it is quick and dirty, but I have already found it useful.
To run the app:
cmd> ruby -rubygems ./ec2_manager.rb
subscribe to our feed