Week 2, Day 3

In-class activity

Session spent bringing everyone to point where they could sign on to an EC2 instance. This included:

• Installing an SSH client (Windows users only)
• Generating an SSH key (if user didn’t have one)
• Signing on to AWS
• Uploading public part of key pair to Amazon
• Adding frequently-used services to AWS menu (optional, but useful)
• Understanding EC2 console page
• Specifying and launching an EC2 instance
• Connecting to the EC2 instance using SSH and the key generated earlier
• Using tmux to manage SSH session (optional, for better usability)

Post-class optional session

For those who wished to stay after 3:20 PM, Izaak continued:

• Running Python on the EC2 instance
• Connecting to AWS S3 storage
• Uploading images to AWS S3 storage using Python boto library

(Optional) Reading guide for next class

Optional but useful preparation for Monday’s class.

Review the Tutorial on using SQS from boto. Skim the Reference for the boto SQS module.

Key points to look for:

• Creating a queue
• Writing a message
• Reading a message
• Deleting a message. Note that reading doesn’t delete a message.

Cautions:

• The boto reference manual is confusingly organized and a bit out of date. For now, just skim it.

If you want to play with SQS, try connecting, creating a queue, writing a message, reading a message, and deleting it. Note that if you simply create a queue using SQSConnection, it will be created in the us-east-1 region, not the us-west-2 (Oregon) region we used on Friday. To create a queue in us-west-2, do boto.sqs.connect_to_region('us-west-2').create_queue('queuename').