How to start an Amazon EC2 instance programmatically in .NET

Question

I have been attempting to start an instance of EC2 in C# without luck.

When passing in an instance id to start the instance I get an error that the instance cannot b

Answer 1

Try something like this with the AWSSDK to start new instances of an "image id":

RunInstancesResponse response = Client.RunInstances(new RunInstancesRequest()
  .WithImageId(ami_id)
  .WithInstanceType(instance_type)
  .WithKeyName(YOUR_KEYPAIR_NAME)
  .WithMinCount(1)
  .WithMaxCount(max_number_of_instances)
  .WithUserData(Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(bootScript.Replace("\r", ""))))
);

(Note: The .WithUserData() is optional and is used above to pass a short shell script.)

If the call is successful the response should contain a list of instances. You can use something like this to create a list of "instance ids":

if (response.IsSetRunInstancesResult() && response.RunInstancesResult.IsSetReservation() && response.RunInstancesResult.Reservation.IsSetRunningInstance())
{
     List instance_ids = new List();
     foreach (RunningInstance ri in response.RunInstancesResult.Reservation.RunningInstance)
     {
          instance_ids.Add(ri.InstanceId);
     }

     // do something with instance_ids
     ...
}