README

This is a plugin to the Jenkins CI server that will allow you to setup a build slave to run on Amazon EC2 instance, 
given an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) id.

When would you want to use this plugin?  Well, this plugin would come in handy if you have then need to run builds
periodically and wish to leverage Amazon EC2 cloud instances to do that work.  Usage should be fairly intuitive,
simply create a new node of type "EC2 Image Slave".  Open up "slaveConfig.png" for an idea of what it will look like.


Differs from original EC2 plugin whose intent was dynamic allocation of X number of instances from stock AMIs 
on demand.  It is based on the idea of Ephemeral nodes.

The purpose of the new plugin is to be able to configure an EC2 node in the same way you do all other nodes 
in Jenkins.  This would allow much more flexibility on launching techniques and allow windows instances to work.

• no need for a specialized EC2 launcher, Jenkins built-ins are fine
• only starts and stops EC2 instances, useful when you have preconfigured AMIs but don't want them running all the time (not same as dynamic provisioning)


This is a maven project.  To build, run:
$ mvn clean -DskipTests install
this will yield a proper Jenkins plugin at target/ec2-slave.hpi

You can also test this plugin in an embedded Jenkins by running
$ mvn hpi:run
or
$ mvnDebug hpi:run

TODOs:
Form Fields
* add help text to fields
* field verification / more advanced input types for fields
* writeup wiki documentation on how to prepare EC2 slaves

ETC/Nice to have
* list any potential runnaway instances (i.e. unbound slaves) and allow user to kill them on the spot
* possibly support starting of existing (stopped) EC2 instances in addition to AMIs
* workspace preservation (is there a plugin already for this?)

Testing
* more testing on runaway instance prevention (a slave should not spin up more than one concurrent instance)