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Parsec-EC2

Easily start and stop Parsec-ready EC2 spot instances to make cloud gaming even cheaper.

Background

Building on the excellent work done by Larry Gadea, Daniel Thomas, Josh McGhee, Benjamin Malley, and the Parsec team, I started working on this project to allow for two very specific pieces of functionality I was looking for that I had not yet seen implemented anywhere else:

  • To be able to easily switch between instance types without manually editing files
  • To be able to arbitrarily specify a spot bid price per session relative to the current highest spot price in a given availability zone

This is very much a work in progress and my first attempt at writing a non-trivial application in Go. Improvements and pull requests are very much encouraged and welcome.

Requirements

This has been developed with MacOS in mind, but should also work on Linux.

Note that for now this project will not work with Terraform 0.11.0, as this version introduced some breaking changes in how the terraform output command works. For now, to continue using parsec-ec2, use Terraform 0.10.0. Multiple versions of Terraform can be managed using the tfenv project.

Installation

The latest version of parsec-ec2 can be installed using go get.

go get -u github.com/LGUG2Z/parsec-ec2

Make sure $GOPATH is set correctly that and that $GOPATH/bin is in your $PATH.

The parsec-ec2 executable will be installed under the $GOPATH/bin directory.

Once installed, add export PARSEC_EC2_SERVER_KEY=your_server_key to your shell rc file.

You can find your server key by going to your Parsec account page and looking at the 'Your Configuration Settings for Self Hosting in the Cloud' section at the bottom. You may first have to click the 'Generate Config Settings' button. You should eventually see something like the following:

network_server_start_port=8000
app_host=1
server_key=xxxxx
app_check_user_data=1
app_first_run=0

The server_key value is the one that you should assign to the PARSEC_EC2_SERVER_KEY environment variable.

Usage

init

After an initial installation or upgrade, all users should run parsec-ec2 init.

The init command will create the directory $HOME/.parsec-ec2 and the required Terraform template and provisioning userdata files. The command can safely be run multiple times.

price

The price command looks for the current highest spot price for the requested instance type in the requested region.

The --region and --instance-type flags are required.

Examples:

$ parsec-ec2 price --region eu-west-1 --instance-type g2.2xlarge

>> The highest spot price in region eu-west-1 for g2.2xlarge instances is currently $0.87/hour.

start

The start command makes a spot request for the requested EC2 instance type in the specified region. If PARSEC_EC2_SERVER_KEY has not been exported in the shell rc file, it must be passed to the command using the --server-key flag.

The amount to bid above the current highest spot price for the instance is specified using the --bid flag, so if the current highest spot price is $0.20, running the command with --bid 0.10 will make a spot request with a bid price of $0.30. Alternatively this flag can be left blank if you don't want to bid higher than the current highest bid price.

You also need to provide --volume-size parameter which is going to be used to determine the size of the root volume. And --ami-name will be used to search AMI either from Parsec's AWS account or your own.

If the --plan flag is used, the spot request will not be sent and instead the terraform plan command will be run which will output to the terminal the details of any AWS resources that will be created by running the start command.

Examples:

# With PARSEC_EC2_SERVER_KEY already set as an env variable
parsec-ec2 start \
--region eu-west-1 \
--instance-type g3.4xlarge \
--bid 0.10 \
--volume-size 45 \
--ami-name parsec-ksp-1


# With the server key passed using the --server-key flag
parsec-ec2 start \
--region eu-west-2 \
--instance-type g2.2xlarge \
--bid 0.10 \
--volume-size 45 \
--ami-name parsec-ksp-1 \
---server-key xxxxx

# With the --plan flag
parsec-ec2 start \
--region eu-central-1 \
--instance-type g2.2xlarge \
--bid 0.10 \
--volume-size 45 \
--ami-name parsec-ksp-1 \
--plan

status

The status command queries the launched instance and gets the current initialisation status.

Once an instance is reporting a status of initialised, it may still take some time for the instance to show up in the Parsec desktop application. This is because time is still required for the provisioning script to run on the instance, which is what will allow the Parsec application to launch and log in with the provided Parsec server key.

Example:

parsec-ec2 status

stop

The stop command stops a Parsec EC2 instance created using the start command. Under the hood this command runs terraform destroy, with removes all AWS resources that are identified for creation in the terraform template.

This command depends on session information that is created by the start command and stored in $HOME/.parsec-ec2/currentSession.json, so if this has been manually modified or removed after running the start command, the stop command will not execute. In this situation it is still possible to manually run terraform destroy in the $HOME/.parsec-ec2 directory. You will receive prompts for variable values, but these can all be left blank with the exception of the region variable, which can be set to the region the instances were started in.

Example:

parsec-ec2 stop