How to find out the Source of EC2 instance launch: Amazon EC2

Wondering how to find the source of ec2 instance launch? We can help you with this!

As a part of our AWS Support Services, we often receive similar requests from our AWS customers.

Today, let’s see the steps followed by our Support Techs to help our customers to find the source of ec2 instance launch.
 

Source of ec2 instance launch

 
We often receive requests from our AWS customers that ‘they have running Amazon EC2 instances that they didn’t launch yet’.

Now let’s see the steps followed by our support techs to determine how EC2 instances on our account have launched.

• We need to find out if the instances have launched by other AWS services.
• Also we need to find out if other authorized users of our AWS account have launched the instances.

Find out if the instances have launched by other AWS services

 
As part of their function some AWS services launch Amazon EC2 instances.
Here, the following services might be configured to launch EC2 instances among all the other Amazon services:

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk: By default, the AWS Elastic bean stalk includes EC2 instances and Auto Scaling rules.Auto Scaling rules might launch EC2 instances, depending on how they are configured. So we need to terminate the environment and all its resources.
• Amazon EMR: This allows us to launch clusters and nodes, which are groups of EC2 instances.
• AWS OpsWorks: Based on the instructions in the stack’s cookbook, this can launch groups of AWS resources. If we launch an OpsWorks stack, then the cookbook might be configured to launch EC2 instances as part of the stack. To terminate the resources associated with a stack, we need todelete the stack.
• AWS CloudFormation: We can configure a CloudFormation template to launch instances as part of a stack. So we need to delete the stack on the AWS CloudFormation console.

Find out if other authorized users of our AWS account have launched the instances

 
As part of a project that they were working on, the authorized users might have launched the instances. So we can use AWS CloudTrail to look for instances of the RunInstances API call or we should check with the authorized users to verify they have launched any instances.

Also note that to manage which users can launch instances or use AWS services, we can use AWS Identity and IAM.

[Need help with more AWS queries? We’d be happy to assist]
 

Conclusion

 
To conclude, today we discussed the steps followed by our Support Engineers to help our customers to find the source of ec2 instance launch.