Starting EC2 instances using PHP

I run a small podcast website called CCHits.net. It runs on Dreamhost because they offer unlimited storage and bandwidth, but while it’s a great service for storage, it’s not really useful for running a batch process because long running processes are killed regularly (in my case, building the cchits podcasts on a daily basis).

As a result, I built an EC2 instance which I trigger every day using a cronjob. Previously, I used the “AWS CLI tools”, but as this uses a Java Virtual Machine, it was taking an awful lot of resources just to spin up an instance, and Dreamhost kept killing the task off. As a result, I found the AWS PHP SDK, and coded up this little snippet to spin up the EC2 instance.

<?php // This code is released under a CC-Zero license // https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ // You need the AWS SDK - get the zip file from here: // http://pear.amazonwebservices.com/get/aws.zip // And then unpack it to this directory. require dirname(__FILE__) . '/aws-autoloader.php'; // Use the Ec2Client libraries by referring just to Ec2Client use Aws\Ec2\Ec2Client; // Technically, at this point, nothing has "failed", but // nothing has succeeded $failed = true; // Try 5 times to start the instance for ($try = 0; $failed && $try < 5; $try++) { try { // Create an Ec2Client object using the credentials below $client = Ec2Client::factory(array( // Credentials obtained by creating a user account in: // https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home?#users // Remember to add a full admin access user policy to the user 'key' => '', 'secret' => '', 'region' => 'us-east-1' )); // Now start the instance $result = $client->startInstances(array( // You must put an instance ID here 'InstanceIds' => array('') )); $failed = false; } catch (Exception $e) { // If either the credentials are wrong, or EC2 has a problem // this will tell you what has happened. echo "Failed: " . $e->getMessage() . "\r\n"; sleep(20); } } // If you've actually managed to start an instance // this will tell you that it's started if (!$failed) { $arrResult = $result['StartingInstances'][0]; $was = $arrResult['PreviousState']['Name']; $is = $arrResult['CurrentState']['Name']; echo "Instance was: $was\r\nInstance is: $is\r\n"; }

Starting EC2 instances using PHP

JonTheNiceGuy

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