Spin up new EC2 instances programatically with Python Boto

Question

What I'm trying to do, is not have to manually create new EC2 instances as needed through the AWS.Amazon.com site, but rather programtically start up new instances based off a ami using python's boto module

import boto.ec2
conn = boto.ec2.connect_to_region("us-west-2",
    aws_access_key_id='<aws access key>',
    aws_secret_access_key='<aws secret key>')

#how to now spin up new instances based off a snapshot (already) preconfigured on ec2?

As in my comment, I'm trying to startup new instances based off a specific given ami id?

I can't seem to find a good way to do this. Can anyone help here?

Thank you

Answer 1

From the documentation:

Possibly, the most important and common task you’ll use EC2 for is to launch, stop and terminate instances. In its most primitive form, you can launch an instance as follows:

conn.run_instances('<ami-image-id>') 

This will launch an instance in the specified region with the default parameters. You will not be able to SSH into this machine, as it doesn’t have a security group set. See EC2 Security Groups for details on creating one.

Now, let’s say that you already have a key pair, want a specific type of instance, and you have your security group all setup. In this case we can use the keyword arguments to accomplish that:

conn.run_instances(
    '<ami-image-id>',
    key_name='myKey',
    instance_type='c1.xlarge',
    security_groups=['your-security-group-here'])

The <ami-image-id> is where you fill in your ami id.