Once you have set up your account and select or create your AMIs, you are ready to boot your instance. You can start your AMI on any number of On-Demand instances by using the RunInstances API call. You simply need to indicate how many instances you wish to launch. If you wish to run more than 20 On-Demand instances, complete the Amazon EC2 instance request form.
If Amazon EC2 is able to fulfill your request, RunInstances will return success, and we will start launching your instances. You can check on the status of your instances using the DescribeInstances API call. You can also programmatically terminate any number of your instances using the TerminateInstances API call.
If you have a running instance using an Amazon EBS boot partition, you can also use the StopInstances API call to release the compute resources but preserve the data on the boot partition. You can use the StartInstances API when you are ready to restart the associated instance with the Amazon EBS boot partition.
In addition, you have the option to use Spot Instances to reduce your computing costs when you have flexibility in when your applications can run. Read more about Spot Instances for a more detailed explanation on how Spot Instances work.
If you prefer, you can also perform all these actions from the AWS Management Console or through the command line using our command line tools, which have been implemented with this web service API.
