I've set this up to help share any useful discoveries I've made in my exploration of the crepuscular world of AWS and the various bits of software that have sprung up around it. I may digress into other areas in due course but mainly I'd like to save other people some pain.
First off: starcluster configuration
I've not tried it yet but starcluster looks pretty cool. However its config is a bit of a bitch for a stupid reason. Here is the one piece of information I've not yet found anywhere on the internet which might have saved me a little bit of pain and distraction.
If you try to do something simple with starcluster after config and get the following message:
!!! ERROR - AuthFailure: AWS was not able to validate the provided access credentials
Then check you've overwritten or just deleted the comments when filling in your access keys!
I found this out by hacking the code in usual style to see why it wasn't working and found that it thought my keys were the following:
access: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx #your_aws_access_key_id
secret: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx #your_secret_access_key
where it should have been
access: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
secret: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
That's right! It doesn't realise the bit after the # is a comment. Doh.
