How to get a Snapshot report from AWS using Python..

I was not sure if I was making a mistake by leaving Micron for a job in a small company. Anyway I don’t regret the move. In fact I actually love this job so far. It has all the good and bad things of working in a small company. Things are messy there. But.. the opportunity to learn and perform are tremendous, and that is what I really was looking for.

I was asked to modify a python script written by an ex-employee to get the snapshot report from AWS. I have never touched python for at least 5 years, and even then, that was all about simple things. And my experience with AWS SDK were none. So when I looked at the code, I did not understand anything. So I decided to do it myself from scratch instead of modifying it.

You can find the script here.

Basically, it collects the access and secret keys as arguments, then connect to ec2, get all the running instances, then the volumes attached to it, and then the snapshots. I have no idea if it is the best way to do it. I don’t even think that I used the best python practices.  Anyway, it works well now. Once the script is executed, it will create a nice csv file as follows, which is great. It has all the fields, and it is easy to manipulate in a spreadsheet according to our needs.Snapshots

This saves us a  lot of time from checking manually for each of our customer accounts if the snapshots are there or not.

I feel pretty proud about this. You know, no matter how bad  the code is, it works. 😉