To install fog you will need to install Ruby Gems. If you have them type

  sudo gem install fog

The install may fail if you don't have the libxslt and libxml2 dev libraries. On my Ubuntu laptop I resolved it by doing

  sudo apt-get install libxslt1-dev libxml2-dev

On Centos/RHEL 5 I had to do

   yum install libxslt-devel libxml2-devel

Create a file called config.rb which contains your credentials e.g.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

@aws_access_key_id = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
@aws_secret_access_key = "AXXZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ"
@aws_region = "us-east-1"

Let's start with the basics. Let's get our currently running instances and what images are available

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'fog'

# Import EC2 credentials e.g. @aws_access_key_id and @aws_access_key_id
require './config.rb'

# Set up a connection
connection = Fog::AWS::EC2.new(
    :aws_access_key_id => @aws_access_key_id,
    :aws_secret_access_key => @aws_secret_access_key )

# Get a list of all the running servers/instances
instance_list = connection.servers.all

num_instances = instance_list.length
puts "We have " + num_instances.to_s()  + " servers"

# Print out a table of instances with choice columns
instance_list.table([:id, :flavor_id, :ip_address, :private_ip_address, :image_id ])

###################################################################
# Get a list of our images
###################################################################
my_images_raw = connection.describe_images('Owner' => 'self')
my_images = my_images_raw.body["imagesSet"]

puts "\n###################################################################################"
puts "Following images are available for deployment"
puts "\nImage ID\tArch\t\tImage Location"

#  List image ID, architecture and location
for key in 0...my_images.length
  print my_images[key]["imageId"], "\t" , my_images[key]["architecture"] , "\t\t" , my_images[key]["imageLocation"],  "\n";
end

Let's spin up a m1.large instance

#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'fog'
# Import EC2 credentials e.g. @aws_access_key_id and @aws_access_key_id
require './config.rb'

# Set up a connection
connection = Fog::AWS::EC2.new(
 :aws_access_key_id => @aws_access_key_id,
 :aws_secret_access_key => @aws_secret_access_key )

server = connection.servers.create(:image_id => 'ami-1234567',
 :flavor_id =>  'm1.large')

# wait for it to be ready to do stuff
server.wait_for { print "."; ready? }

puts "Public IP Address: #{server.ip_address}"
puts "Private IP Address: #{server.private_ip_address}"

This may take a while so please be patient.  You could obviously spin up a number of these instances without waiting for any of them to be available then use connection.servers.all to get a list of running instances.

Now let's destroy a running instance

#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'fog'
# Import EC2 credentials e.g. @aws_access_key_id and @aws_access_key_id
require './config.rb'

# Set up a connection
connection = Fog::AWS::EC2.new(
    :aws_access_key_id => @aws_access_key_id,
    :aws_secret_access_key => @aws_secret_access_key )

instance_id = "1-123456"

server = connection.servers.get(instance_id)

puts "Flavor: #{server.flavor_id}"
puts "Public IP Address: #{server.ip_address}"
puts "Private IP Address: #{server.private_ip_address}"

server.destroy

There is tons more out there although this gets me going . Now off to playing with R.I. Pienaar's ec2-boot-init.

Thanks to Wesley Beary for answering questions about fog and Ian Meyer for pointing out Chef Fog code.