Managing EC2 instances

It doesn't make sense for many of us to own and host our own servers, in the same way as it doesn't make sense for us to generate our own electricity. Just like electricity, computing is now a utility. Utility computing (often called cloud computing, for no known reason) allows you to buy as much compute power as you need, for as long as you need it. This makes it easy and cost-efficient to scale your service in response to fluctuating demand.

Being able to create new cloud server instances, use them for a few minutes or hours, and then delete them also makes it a lot easier to test and experiment with new software or configurations. If you had to build the servers by hand every time, this process would be too lengthy to make it worthwhile, but with automated configuration management, it's a snap.

There are plenty of cloud service providers around, with Amazon's EC2 being one of the best-known and oldest-established. In this recipe I'll show you how to manage cloud instances...