Amazon EC2 - Create session

Declaration

<AMAWSEC2 
		 ACTIVITY="create_session" ACCESSKEY="text" 
		 SECRETKEY="text (options)" PROXYHOST="text" 
		 USERAGENT="text" PROXYPORT="number" PROXYUSER="text" 
		 PROXYPWD="text (options)" MAXERRORRETRY="number" 
		 SIGNMETHOD="text" SIGNVERSION="number" SESSION="text" 
		 />

Description: Creates a unique session which can be used to associate subsequent Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) steps. This provides a single task the ability to execute numerous EC2 operations associated to a specific session.

IMPORTANT: AWS EC2 activities are performed using Amazon's EC2 engine. They require a valid Amazon EC2 service account (via Access key and Secret access key) to ensure proper functionality.

Practical Usage

Ideally used to create a session to correlate subsequent Amazon EC2 activities to. Creating a session eliminates having to re-enter specific requirements for each activity.

Credentials Parameters

Property

Type

Required

Default

Markup

Description

Access key

Text

Yes if connection is host-based

(Empty)

ACCESSKEY=

"022QF06E7MXBSH9DHM02"

A 20-character alphanumeric string that uniquely identifies the owner of the AWS service account, similar to a username. This key along with a corresponding secret access key forms a secure information set that AWS uses to confirm a valid user's identity.

Secret Access key

Text

Yes if connection is host-based

(Empty)

SECRETKEY=

"kWcrlUX5JEDGM/LtmEENI/

aVmYvHNif5zB+d9+ct"

A 40-character string that serves the role as password to access the AWS service account. This along with an associated access key forms a secure information set that EC2 uses to confirm a valid user's identity.

User agent

Text

No

AutoMate

USERAGENT="AutoMate"

The name of the client or application initiating requests to AWS. The default value is 'AutoMate'. 

Service URL

Text

No

(Empty)

SERVICEURL=

"https://ec2.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com"

The URL that provides the service endpoint. To make the service call to a different region, you can pass the region-specific endpoint URL. For example, entering  https://ec2.us-west-1.amazonaws.com points to US West (Northern California) region. A complete list of EC2 regions, accompanying endpoints and valid protocols can be found below under EC2 Regions and Endpoints.

Maximum retry on error

Number

No

(Empty)

MAXERRORRETRY="4"

The total amount of instances this activity should retry the request before returning an error. Network components can generate errors anytime in the life of a request, thus, implementing retries can increase reliability. 

Proxy host

Text

No

(Empty)

  1. PROXYHOST="proxy.host.com"

  2. PROXYHOST="193.118.431.52"

The host name (e.g., server.domain.com) or IP address (e.g., xxx.xxx.xxx.xx) of the proxy server to use when connecting to AWS.  

Proxy port

Number

No

(Empty)

PROXYPORT="1028"

The port that should be used to connect to the proxy server.

Signature method

Text

No

(Empty)

SIGNMETHOD="HmacSHA256"

The signature method to use for signing the request. This provides a valid hashing algorithm for signature calculation. Valid AWS signature methods are HmacSHA1 and HmacSHA256.

Signature version

Number

No

(Empty)

SIGNVERSION="2"

The signature version for signing the request. Valid AWS signature versions are 2 and 4. The difference with version 4 is that it allows you to sign your message using a key that is derived from your secret access key rather than using the secret access key itself.

Session Name

Text

Yes

EC2Session1

SESSION="EC2Session1"

The session name to be created. This allows several EC2 activities to be linked to this  session, eliminating redundancy. Numerous sessions can be used within a single task. The default value is EC2Session1.

NOTE: Use the End Session activity to end an EC2 session.

Description tab - A custom description can be provided on the Description tab to convey additional information or share special notes about a task step.

Error Causes tab - Specify how this step should behave upon the occurrence of an error. (Refer to Task Builder > Error Causes Tab for details.)

On Error tab - Specify what AWE should do if this step encounters an error as defined on the Error Causes tab. (Refer to Task Builder > On Error Tab for details.)

EC2 Regions and Endpoints

This table contains a complete list of EC2 endpoints, accompanying regions and supported protocols.

Endpoint

Region

Protocol

ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com

US East (Northern Virginia) Region

HTTP and HTTPS

ec2.us-west-2.amazonaws.com

US West (Oregon) Region

HTTP and HTTPS

ec2.us-west-1.amazonaws.com  

US West (Northern California) Region

HTTP and HTTPS

ec2.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com

EU (Ireland) Region

HTTP and HTTPS

ec2.ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com

Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region

HTTP and HTTPS

ec2.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com

Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region

HTTP and HTTPS

ec2.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com

Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region

HTTP and HTTPS

ec2.sa-east-1.amazonaws.com  

South America (Sao Paulo) Region

HTTP and HTTPS

Example

The sample AML code below can be copied and pasted directly into the Steps panel of the Task Builder.

Description: Create EC2 session "MyEC2Session". AWS access key is "AKIAJU2LHLMG6BA6BZTB".

<AMAWSEC2 ACTIVITY="create_session" 
SESSION="MyEC2Session" 
ACCESSKEY="AKIAJU2LHLMG6BA6BZTB" 
SECRETKEY="AM2NwWddPVgP5TlBXZ0pmAulL0Fulg==aME" />