Python and AWS Cookbook

If you intend to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for remote computing and storage, Python is an ideal programming language for developing applications and controlling your cloud-based infrastructure. This cookbook gets you started with more than two dozen recipes for using Python with AWS, based on the author’s boto library.

You’ll find detailed recipes for working with the S3 storage service as well as EC2, the service that lets you design and build cloud applications. Each recipe includes a code solution you can use immediately, along with a discussion of why and how the recipe works. You also get detailed advice for using boto with AWS and other cloud services.

This book’s recipes include methods to help you:

• Launch instances on EC2, and keep track of them with tags
• Associate an Elastic IP address with an instance
• Restore a failed Elastic Block Store volume from a snapshot
• Store and monitor your own custom metrics in CloudWatch
• Create a bucket in S3 to contain your data objects
• Reduce the cost of storing noncritical data
• Prevent accidental deletion of data in S3

Mitch Garnaat is a software developer at Eucalyptus Systems where he is responsible for the development of tools to make it easier to create and manage cloud computing resources. Previously, as a Principal Engineer at Xerox PARC he was the co-inventor and lead developer of DocuShare, a web-based document management product from Xerox. He is the creator of boto, an open source Python library for cloud computing.