I want to use an Amazon EC2 Windows instance to do remote demos of our software for potential customers. I have the instance set up and it runs fine. When the instance is running, I know how to generate a rdp link to allow customers to remote desktop in and play with our software.
However, I don't want to leave the instance running all the time, as this costs money, and we only need it for 1-2 hour demos per week.
What would be nice, is if the customer could click something on our website, and that would send a command to the EC2 to start the instance, and then give the rdp link file to the customer.
My question: is it possibly to remotely start a EC2 instance? Or is the only way to do this to manually log into the aws site and click 'start'?
Best Answer
Yes.
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/APIReference/, Actions -> StartInstances.