Provide option to terminate after "X" minutes

[JCapriotti]

I sometimes leave EC2 instances created by kitchen out there a little longer than planned. I was thinking it might be good to provide an option to terminate instances after a predetermined amount of time.

I have started working on this and have it partially completed. I'm looking for feedback to see if this seems like a good or bad idea before I get much farther.

Implementation-wise... here is what I'm looking at:

• Create an option named terminate_after_minutes. Setting it to > 0 will cause a shutdown after that number of minutes.
• When that new option is set, then instance_initiated_shutdown_behavior will override to terminate. That was my initial idea but after typing that out it might be better to leave this alone.
• Linux instances will have a cron job that calls that executes at instance creation time + x minutes
• Windows instances will have a Scheduled Task to do the same.

[coderanger]

While I sympathize and would use the feature myself, I think this might be out of scope for us :/

[cheeseplus]

Thats a bunch of work that kitchen itself really shouldn't be doing - internally at Chef we have reaper scripts and we enforce strict tagging rules to cull any errant instances or forgotten tk instances. We highly recommend that path as it's not exclusive to kitchen and especially on EC2 is easy to implement with lambdas.

I'm definitely of the "this is out of scope" mindset - the implementation across operating systems will be problematic and my concern is that instead of being a value add it'd add to the pile of edge case prone code we already maintain.

Totally sympathize here as well but firmly believe it's better to enforce this via another external mechanism. If the EC2 API itself supported some sort of time fuse for instances I could see this being viable but the idea of adding config to systems that chef or another provisioner could also be interacting with gives me the heebie jeebies when I think about possible bad interactions there.

[JCapriotti]

Makes sense; I'll go down the road of using tags and some sort of script. Thanks!