taw is a command line interface for Amazon EC2. taw stands for Tiny Amazon ec2 Wrapper. taw is designed to provide a limited number of operations so that new users can easily understand what they can do with Amazon EC2, S3, and Route 53.
taw is designed for researchers who try to use the computing resources of Amazon EC2 but are not familier with cloud computing environments such as Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, or Google Compute Platform, but maybe it is also useful for other people.
Amazon EC2 is a great cloud environment that provides us with easy-to-use on-demand computing resources. The web interface of Amazon EC2 is sophisticated so that new users can easily use cloud resources. However, the command line interface for Amazon EC2 (CLI, hereafter) is too complex and hard to understand. This design was chosen presumably because the users of the command line interface are professional and more familier with the system of Amazon EC2. First, CLI provides only a low-level interface although the web interface provides higher-level operations for common operations. Second, CLI exposes all APIs with all parameters in an equal way. In other words, new users have no way to guess which API is more common than others. Deprecated parameters for compatibility are hidden as optional parameters with a reasonable default value in the web interface but the document for CLI does not explain it at all.
In academia, a small group of researchers such as a lab in a university is the one who greatly benefits from cloud computing environments because they unload the burden of maintaining computing resources internally. The pay-as-you-go nature of cloud computing allows us to same a significant amount of money because the small lab usually needs a huge computing resource only occasionally, and for the rest of the time computers would be almost all idle, which is wasteful. However, unlike other core computing facilities where computer geeks are familier with the local computing facility and ready to ask anything, a small lab usually does not afford to hire a person who dedicates to maintain the lab computing infrastructure.
taw is designed specifically for such use cases where no one is familiar with cloud computing nor interested in system maintanace matters. taw is also designed for a small use of cloud computing. If you are going to use thousands of CPU cores on Amazon EC2 or use hundreads of terabytes of storage in Amazon S3, I recommend you to learn how Amazon EC2 works; you would be able to use the Amazon Command Line interface and maybe you would not need taw.
The design goal of taw is to make a small group of people who use only a handful of resources (up to 100 instances, up to thousands objects in a S3 bucket, a few zones, etc.) feel more comfortable with the command line interface.
Set up your AWS credential.
$ aws configureList instances.
$ taw list # this is a shorthand for 'taw instance list'
$ taw instance listList all instances in all regions.
$ taw instance list --allregionsStart an instance with NAME tag with a value webserver01.
$ taw instance start webserver01Stop an instance with NAME tag with a value webserver01.
$ taw instance stop webserver01Terminate an instance with NAME tag with a valie webserver01.
$ taw instance terminate webserver01python setup.py install will install taw command.
It is not (yet) available in PyPI, but it will appear soon.
First you need to setup your credential (ID/password).
You can set it up in the same way as AWS Command Line
Interface.
Briefly, you need to execute aws configure and answer the questions
(the example below is taken from the mentioned web page).
$ aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [None]: AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
Default region name [None]: us-west-2
Default output format [None]: ENTERThose configs are written in plain text files, ~/.aws/credentials and
~/.aws/config so you can edit them if needed.
If you have multiple AWS accounts and wish to switch over them, you can
specify --profile option to save another credential (again, the
example is taken from the official document).
$ aws configure --profile user2
AWS Access Key ID [None]: AKIAI44QH8DHBEXAMPLE
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: je7MtGbClwBF/2Zp9Utk/h3yCo8nvbEXAMPLEKEY
Default region name [None]: us-east-1
Default output format [None]: textYou can give --profile=user2 to taw when you use profile user2.
Setting an environment variable AWS_DEFAULT_PROFILE changes the
default profile used.
taw has subcommands like git has subcommands.
Each subcommand has a document in doc/ directory.
Bash uesrs can use bash completion for taw. To use the completion feature,
source taw_completion.sh in .bash_profile or others.
zsh users can use command-line compoletion for taw as well. zsh has
a "bashcompinit" feature with which users can use a completion script
for bash. To use the completion feature, put the following in
.zsh_profile (or wherever you want).
autoload bashcompinit
bashcompinit
source taw_completion.shMIT
Masahiro Kasahara