Aegea is a command line interface (CLI) that provides a set of essential commands and terminal dashboards for operators of Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts. Aegea lets you build AMIs and Docker images using the cloud-init config management package, manage config roles, launch and monitor instances and services, and manage AWS resources including ELB, RDS, and AWS Batch. Aegea is designed to be used in conjunction with the existing functionality of the AWS CLI and boto3. Aegea can be used in conjunction with tools like MiniWDL to orchestrate large-scale MLops and genomics workflows.
pip install aegea
Run aws configure to configure IAM access credentials that will be used by the
aws and aegea commands. You can create a new IAM key at https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home#/users. See the
AWS CLI documentation for more details.
Below are some highlights from Aegea's suite of commands. Run aegea --help to see the full list of commands.
| Command | Key functionality |
|---|---|
| aegea ls | List running EC2 instances |
| aegea launch | Launch EC2 instances and specify options such as spot tenancy, AMI, instance type, etc. |
| aegea ssh, aegea scp | Connect to running instances, transfer files using AWS Systems Manager or other options |
| aegea batch | Submit, manage and monitor AWS Batch jobs |
| aegea ecs | Monitor ECS clusters and run Fargate tasks |
| aegea build-ami | Build EC2 AMIs using cloud-init configuration scripts |
| aegea build-docker-image | Build AWS ECR docker images using Dockerfiles or cloud-init scripts |
| aegea logs | Download AWS CloudWatch Logs contents using S3 export |
| aegea grep | Query AWS CloudWatch Logs contents using CloudWatch Logs Insights |
| aegea cost | List AWS cost reports generated by AWS Cost Explorer |
| aegea secrets | List and manage secrets stored in AWS Secrets Manager |
| aegea cloudtrail | Query AWS CloudTrail events to audit the security of your AWS account |
The aegea launch command launches EC2 instances. It has integrated support for AWS SSM/EC2 Instance Connect, runtime
cloud-init configuration, automatic location of Aegea-built AMIs or up-to-date Ubuntu or Amazon Linux AMIs, automatic
storage configuration, and other options.
The aegea ssh command (and its variant aegea scp) is an SSH configuration wrapper that integrates with the
AWS Systems Manager and
EC2 Instance Connect
to provide SSH connectivity to your instances without opening any inbound ports (if your instance OS is not configured
with SSM, use aegea ssh --no-ssm to open a direct connection). aegea ssh securely resolves instance addresses by
name and pre-fetches their public keys without the Trust-On-First-Use requirement.
Visual Studio Code provides a
remote development extension pack which allows your
VSCode IDE to connect remotely to AWS instances. To use VSCode with aegea ssh, open the Remote.SSH plugin settings
(command palette > Remote-SSH: Settings) and enter the path to the aegea-ssh executable under the "Remote.SSH: Path"
setting (for example, /usr/local/bin/aegea-ssh). After doing this, you can use the "Remote-SSH: Connect to Host"
palette command to connect to any aegea-launched instance by name or ID (for example, aegea launch my-test-instance
followed by entering my-test-instance in the Connect to Host dialog). Note that VSCode will use the default
AWS CLI profile for authentication.
The AWS Batch API lets you run non-interactive command line workflows in Docker
containers, managing AWS ECS, Fargate, and EC2/Spot in your account on your behalf. Use the aegea batch family of
commands to interact with AWS Batch. The key command is aegea batch submit to submit jobs.
Run aegea batch submit --command "echo 'hello world'" --memory 4096 --vcpus 2 --watch
to run a Batch job that requires 4 GB RAM and 2 cores to be allocated to the Docker container,
and executes the specified command.
You can also use aegea batch submit --execute FILE. This will slurp up FILE (any type of shell script or ELF
executable) and execute it in the job's Docker container.
The concurrency and cost of your Batch jobs is governed by the "Max vCPUs" setting in your compute environment.
To change the capacity or other settings of the default compute environment used by aegea batch, go to
https://console.aws.amazon.com/batch/home?region=us-east-1#/compute-environments, select "aegea_batch", and click
"Edit".
The ECS Fargate API is an interface to the AWS container-based virtualization platform, Firecracker. ECS Fargate allows you to run workloads in fully managed containers: no instances run in your account; you are billed by the second of container use, and containers start up within 10 seconds, compared to minutes for EC2 instances.
AWS Batch can run your jobs on either ECS Container Instances (EC2 instances connected to ECS that Batch manages in your account) or directly in ECS Fargate containers. While Fargate containers are much faster to start, they have lower CPU and memory limits of 4 CPUs and 30 GB RAM (compared to 96 CPUs and 768 GB RAM on EC2).
By default, aegea batch will create and use an AWS Batch compute environment and queue that uses ECS Fargate, but
you can control this by setting the --compute-type option to aegea batch create-compute-environment.
Aegea also supports direct use of ECS Fargate without Batch via the aegea ecs run command. Most aegea batch
semantics are applicable to aegea ecs, which interacts with ECS via the "one shot"
ECS RunTask API.
Aegea supports ingesting configuration from a configurable array of sources. Each source is a JSON or YAML file. Configuration sources that follow the first source update the configuration using recursive dictionary merging. Sources are enumerated in the following order of priority:
- Command line options (values take priority over all other sources)
- Any sources listed in the colon-delimited variable
AEGEA_CONFIG_FILE - User configuration source,
~/.config/aegea/config.yml - Site-wide configuration source,
/etc/aegea/config.yml - Configuration defaults from base_config.yml
Array merge operators: When loading a chain of configuration sources, Aegea uses recursive dictionary merging to
combine the sources. Additionally, when the original config value is a list, Aegea supports array manipulation
operators, which let you extend and modify arrays defined in underlying configurations. For example, to enable full S3
access for all instances launched with aegea launch, add the following to ~/.config/aegea/config.yml:
launch:
iam_policies:
$append: AmazonS3FullAccess
To enable S3 and SQS access, and also list the instance private IP address and availability zone in aegea ls,
add the following:
launch:
iam_policies:
$extend:
- AmazonS3FullAccess
- AmazonSQSFullAccess
ls:
columns:
$extend:
- private_ip_address
- placement.AvailabilityZone
For a listing of available configuration parameters that can be set, run aegea configure or see
https://github.com/kislyuk/aegea/blob/develop/aegea/base_config.yml. See
https://github.com/kislyuk/tweak#array-merge-operators for a formal description of the array merge operators.
Aegea includes a lightweight configuration management system for building machine images based on cloud-init (both Docker images and AMIs are supported).
