Amazon Web Services has an API via a CLI (command line interface) which give users the ability to manage servers from a remote host. The AWS CLI must be installed and authenticated to AWS on the host computer. Once a user is logged in to AWS, they can perform certain management tasks such as starting and stopping EC2 instances.

How to start EC2 instance from AWS CLI

Requires an image id, instance count, instance type, key and security group.

<pre lang="bash">aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-xxxxxxxx --count 1 --instance-type c4.2xlarge --key-name your-key  —security-group-ids sg-xxxxxxxx

How to Associate an Elastic IP Address to an Instance

Requires an instance id and Elastic IP address.

<pre lang="bash">aws ec2 associate-address --instance-id i-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx --public-ip xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

How to Terminate an Instance

Requires an instance id(s).

<pre lang="bash">aws ec2 terminate-instances --instance-ids i-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx