Alestic.com - A Personal AWS Blog by Eric Hammond

When you need an AWS command line toolset not provided by Ubuntu packages, you can download the tools directly from Amazon and install them locally.

In a previous article I provided instructions on how to install AWS command line tools using Ubuntu packages. That method is slightly easier to set up and easier to upgrade when Ubuntu releases updates. However, the Ubuntu packages aren’t always up to date with the latest from Amazon and there are not yet Ubuntu packages published for every AWS command line tools you might want to use.

Unfortunately, Amazon does not have one single place where you can download all the command line tools for the various services, nor are all of the tools installed in the same way, nor do they all use the same format for accessing the AWS credentials.

The following steps show how I install and configure the AWS command line tools provided by Amazon when I don’t use the packages provided by Ubuntu.

See also: Installing AWS Command Line Tools from Amazon Downloads

Here are the steps for installing the AWS command line tools that are currently available as Ubuntu packages. These include:

• EC2 API tools
• EC2 AMI tools
• IAM - Identity and Access Management
• RDS - Relational Database Service
• CloudWatch
• Auto Scaling
• ElastiCache

Starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise, these are also available:

• CloudFormation
• ELB - Elastic Load Balancer

Install Packages

Do you want to run short jobs on Amazon EC2 on a recurring schedule, but don’t want to pay for an instance running all the time?

Would you like to do this using standard Amazon AWS services without needing an external server to run and terminate the instance?

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is normally used to keep a reasonable number of instances running to handle measured or expected load (e.g., web site traffic, queue processing).

In this article I walk through the steps to create an Auto Scaling configuration that runs an instance on a recurring schedule (e.g., four times a day) starting up a pre-defined task and letting that instance shut itself down when it is finished. We tweak the Auto Scaling group so that this uses the minimum cost in instance run time, even though we may not be able to predict in advance exactly how long it will take to complete the job.

Here’s a high level overview for folks familiar with Auto Scaling: