Optimizely Open Sources Python Scripts for Amazon EC2

Today we’re excited to release an open source grab bag of scripts for Amazon EC2, available at https://github.com/jeff-optimizely/grab-bag-for-ec2

There are two main purposes for the grab bag:

1. The Grab Bag contains useful scripts – such as a backup script – that you may want to use by themselves.
2. The Grab Bag scripts can be used as examples for creating your own scripts.

The repository contains Python scripts for creating instances, creating RAID arrays, backing up volumes, updating ELBs, and updating your /etc/hosts file with aliases for your EC2 instances.

To get started with the scripts, add your AWS access key and secret to the credentials.py. It’s a best practice to test third party code with a secondary account first, rather than executing it on your primary account.

Version 1.0 contains the following files:
backup_config.json – a config file for backup.py
backup.py – a backup script for backing up volumes on Amazon EC2
common.py – common functions that can be used by the other scripts
create_instance.py – a script for creating an instance and doing other first-time maintenance work, such as installing Yum packages
create_raid.py – a script for creating a RAID array and attaching it to an instance
credentials.py – your AWS credentials
README.md – a read me file
update_elb.py – a script for adding to and removing from an ELB
update_hosts.py – a script that adds the IP addresses of your EC2 instances to your /etc/hosts file, for convenience

We’re also inviting other developers to contribute to this collection of scripts. If you have ideas for new scripts, edits or improvements, please contribute. We’re looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

And Python developers, stay tuned. We have another project we’re planning to open source in the near future for efficiently working with MongoDB.

If this post interests you, we’re also looking to hire backend and dev ops engineers.  See our jobs page for more info.