Amazon Web Services

This is a follow-up to a previous post where I was having trouble running apt-get as part of the initial boot process for a new AWS instance.

I actually never could automatically load packages using the recommended workaround of using apt_mirror :


#cloud-config
apt_mirror: http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/


When I'd check the cloud-init log at /var/log/ apt-get would just sort of silently fail.

Ubuntu's cloud-init is a mechanism which can be used to provision a new instance upon initial boot. I imagine cloud-init can be used in many environments, but I'll focus on its use in Amazon Web Services (AWS).

You can invoke cloud-init in at least a couple ways :

- shell, with a lead line of #!/bin/sh
- cloud-init, with a lead line of #cloud-config

I was able to install the AWS PHP SDK 2 on Ubuntu 12.04 using Composer.

Here's a simple script which will show sample output from the EC2 Describe commands :

https://gist.github.com/dkl4/5135777

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the new SDK for PHP 2 for Amazon Web Services (AWS) is kind of lacking in documentation. Since the PHP SDK 2 for AWS is pretty new (November, 2012), hopefully this lack of documentation will be addressed. However, here are some notes which will help me and hopefully others.

At least for now, I'll focus on EC2 examples and code as that's what I need at the moment.

I'm pretty new to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and especially "managing" AWS through PHP, so hopefully this will help me and others.

There are apparently two ("1" and "2") PHP-based SDKs available to manage AWS with PHP. It looks like version two was announced in November, 2012.

When the PHP SDK 2 was released, it seemed like it didn't support as many AWS features as PHP SDK 1, but now SDK 2 seems to support all AWS features, including new ones like OpsWorks.

So which one is better?