Quickspot

Deploy spot instances (one-time) from the command line

Simple workflow

Quickspot has flexible config files that allow you to create and connect to multiple spot-instances. For a user that is going to be using a single spot instance at any point of time, below is a simple workflow

• Configure ~/.config/aws/config.json and ~/.config/aws/global_config.json
• Execute qs create to create a spot instance
• qs connect to connect to the instance
• qs list to the list set of running instances.
• From the EC2-instance, run sudo shutdown -h now to terminate the spot instance.

Installation

$ pip install appdirs==1.4.4
$ pip install git+https://github.com/rahul13ramesh/quickspot.git

Setup

• Fetch the AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY from the IAM console
• Setup credentials and the default zone for boto3 (guide)
• Configure ~/.config/aws/global_config.json (global config applied to all instances). The KeyName is the name of the private key on AWS while pem-file is the path to the file on your machine. tags will be applied to every instance your create.

{ 
    "aws_access_key_id": "AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID",
    "aws_secret_access_key": "AWS_SECRETE_ACCESS_KEY",
    "pem-file": "~/.ssh/laptop", 
    "KeyName": "laptop",
    "tags": [
        {
            "Key": "owner",
            "Value": "rahul"
        }
    ],
    "defaultConfig": "config.json"
}

• Configure ~/.config/aws/config.json (instance specific config) from the command line. volume-id is the external volume you would like to attach. Set it to None if you would like to attach no volume. tags are applied to only the specific instance created using this configuration file. Supply an empty array if you would like no such tags to be applied

{
    "ImageId": "ami-0123450012341234",
    "InstanceType": "g4dn.xlarge",
    "KeyName": "rahul-laptop",
    "SecurityGroupIds": [ "sg-012345abcdef" ],
    "Placement": {
            "AvailabilityZone": "us-east-1b"
    },
    "volume-id": "vol-00abscddefghijk",
    "tags": [{
        "Key": "Name",
        "Value": "machine1-g4dn-b"
    }]
}

Usage

Usage:
  qs create   [<config_file>]
  qs connect  [<Name_tag>]
  qs copyto   [<Name_tag>]  --src=<src_file> --dst=<dest_file>
  qs copyfrom [<Name_tag>]  --src=<src_file> --dst=<dest_file>
  qs list
  qs price
  qs (-h | --help)

Arguments:
  list           List Instances
  connect        Connect to an active instance
  attach         Attach a volume
  create         Create a new spot instance request
  copyto         Copy from local to EC2 instance
  copyfrom       Copy from EC2 instance to local machine

Options:
  -h, --help     Show this screen.

Create

Note that qs create will default to using ~/.config/aws/config.json. You can use another config files as follows:

• Add a file to ~/.config/aws/ (For example ~/.config/aws/config_machine2.json)
• Call qs create config_machine2
• Make sure to add the tag "Name". This can be used with the connect, to specify the instance to which you want to connect to.

Connect

Note that qs connect will connect to one of the running instance. To connect to a specific instance, consider using qs connect <Name tag>, where the name tag is specified in the associated config file (The "Tags" field in ~/.config/aws/config.json)

Shutting down instance

Run the following, from the command line of the ec2-instance

sudo shutdown -h now