Self-Terminating AWS EC2 Instance?

To have an instance terminate itself do both of these steps:

Start the instance with --instance-initiated-shutdown-behavior terminate or the equivalent on the AWS console or API call. Run shutdown -h now as root. On Ubuntu, you could set this up to happen in 55 minutes using: echo "sudo halt" | at now + 55 minutes

I wrote an article a while back on other options to accomplish this same "terminate in an hour" goal:

Automatic Termination of Temporary Instances on Amazon EC2 http://alestic.com/2010/09/ec2-instance-termination

The article was originally written before instance-initiated-shutdown-behavior was available, but you'll find updates and other gems in the comments.

You can do this

ec2-terminate-instances $(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id)

The ec2 will get its current instance id and terminate itself.

Hopefully this will work

instanceId=$(curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id/)
region=$(curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/dynamic/instance-identity/document | grep region | awk '{print $3}' | sed  's/"//g'|sed 's/,//g')

/usr/bin/aws ec2 terminate-instances --instance-ids $instanceId --region $region

Hope this help you !!!

Here is my script for Self-Terminating

$ EC2_INSTANCE_ID="`wget -q -O - http://instance-data/latest/meta-data/instance-id || die \"wget instance-id has failed: $?\"`"
$ echo "ec2-terminate-instances $EC2_INSTANCE_ID" | at now + 55 min || die 'cannot obtain instance-id'

If you want to assign it as Self-Stopping on Self-Terminating, you can do it one time only.

In your EC2 Console go to Instance Settings, change Shutdown Behavior to Stop.
Configure /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg, you may refer to how to run a boot script using cloud-init.
Follow answer from Eric Hammond, put the command in a file and locate it in scripts-per-boot path:

$ echo '#!/bin/sh' > per-boot.sh
$ echo 'echo "halt" | at now + 55 min' >> per-boot.sh
$ echo 'echo per-boot: `date` >> /tmp/per-boot.txt' >> per-boot.sh
$ chmod +x per-boot.sh
$ sudo chown -R root per-boot.sh
$ sudo mv -viu per-boot.sh /var/lib/cloud/scripts/per-boot

Reboot your instance, check if the script is executed:

$ cat /tmp/per-boot.txt 
per-boot: Mon Jul 4 15:35:42 UTC 2016

If so, just in case you forgot to stop your instance, it will assure you that the instance will do itself termination as stopping when it has run for 55 minutes or whatever time you set in the script.

Broadcast message from root@ip-10-0-0-32
        (unknown) at 16:30 ...

The system is going down for halt NOW!

PS: For everyone want to use the Self-Stopping, one thing you should note that not all EC2 types are self recovery on restarting. I recommend to use EC2-VPC/EBS with On/Off Schedule.

I had a similar need, where I had web applications firing up EC2 instances. I could not trust the web application to stop/terminate the instances, so I created a script to run in a separate process, called the "feeder". The feeder owns the responsibility of stopping/terminating the instance. The web application must periodically request that the feeder "feed" the instance. If an instance "starves" (is not fed within a timeout period), the feeder will stop/terminate it. Two feeders can be run simultaneously on different machines to protect against issues with one feeder process. In other words, the instance runs on a pressure switch. When pressure is released, the instance is stopped/terminated. This also allows me to share an instance among multiple users.

To the original question, the feeder, which could be running in the EC2 instance itself, eliminates the need to know a priori how long the task will be running, but it places a burden on the application to provide periodic feedings. If the laptop is closed, the instance will go down.

The feeder lives here: https://github.com/alessandrocomodi/fpga-webserver and has a permissive open-source license.