Automate AWS Infrastructure with Boto 3: AWS Health Checks

Part 2 — How to write a Python script to automate AWS health checks

When I first joined a DevOps/SRE team, I realized there were a lot of simple AWS infrastructure changes that took up a large chunk of our engineering team’s time. I didn’t want to spend my valuable coding time on these manual, yet essential, tasks so I set out on a mission to automate them. Since I had wanted to build my Python scripting skills anyway, I discovered a way to solve two problems at once — using the software development kit Boto 3 to automate my simple, manual AWS tasks using Python.

For the second installment in this series I wanted to cover using Boto 3 and Python to automate AWS health checks for instances and their services and events. If you came from Part 1, then you already know how to import Boto 3 and create a client to use in your script. While we created an EC2 client in the last script, we want to create one for ECS here. Using ECS is going to give us the information we need about services and events, something that EC2 does not provide.

ecs_client = boto3.client('ecs', 'us-east-1')

You can then use this client to perform any of the methods listed in the ECS service section of the Boto 3 documentation. The documentation is super…