AWS: 4. Lanching an EC2 instance using .NET SDK

It is great to be able to very simply launch an EC2 instance and install the application using nothing but a S3 bucket (with binaries) and a bootstrap script. Imagine if you were able to automate this process.

There are multiple ways to interact with the AWS platform. The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and AWS Software Developers Kit (SDK) are one of the few methods. These methods allows developers and system administrators to write scripts to interact with AWS resources. In this post I will be using the AWS .NET SDK to automate the launch process of an EC2 instance.

The AWS .NET SDK has undergone a major restructuring during the last year. Now the .NET SDK is split by AWS service. The NuGet package of a service itself is split into two components, the "Core" dynamic link library (DLL) contains all the plumbing (signature creation etc.) and "Service" DLL contains the supporting classes for the service. The NuGet package that I will be using for this post is "AWSSDK.EC2".

I strongly recommend looking at the AWS .NET blog for updates and tutorials. 

The following .NET code launches a new EC2 instance and does exactly what the manual steps did in one of the previous posts.



The key pieces of information that is of interest are the following.

1. The Amazon Machine Image (AMI) - In this particular case it is the golden image I created.
2. Key pair - The *.pem key use to decrypt the administrator password.
3. Security group - The security group that opens inbound port 88 and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) port. 
4. The region where the instance will be launched

The above values needs to be obtained from the AWS Console except for the region information. Normally the region information is specified as an attribute in the AWS SDK configuration. In my case I am using "eu-west-1". 

There is tons of best practices around securely storing the AWS credentials so that you reduce the risk of adding it to a public repository like Github. Therefore I suggest you look at this post. 

So far so good. I managed to automate the EC2 launching process and able to horizontally scale the application with manual execution of the above script. In the next stop I am going to look further into automating the launch process.