README

# s no warranty
not only is there no implied warranty for this provider, I actually know for a fact that it is full of bugs and should not be used by any sensible person. 

# why ruby bindings

I chose the ruby bindings and not the tools for 2 reasons:

1. they accept credentials, not certs (harder to pass certs through a provider)
2. extra requirement for Java.

I may regret this decision later, the libraries arent as mature as I had hoped    @(8^( }-|<

# current state

This is just a prototype to demonstrate that its possible to use puppet to model dependencies between EC2 instances.

Its nowhere near done, it just has some very basic functionality.
   - ensure that a certain image is present.
   - ensure that a certain image is absent.

## uniqueness hack

EC2 instances dont exactly work with the puppet model.

In puppet, we need to be able to determine uniqueness for a resource when its created.

in EC2, the unique id for an instance is not available until after the image is created.

for this reason, I am using security_group to determine uniqueness. 

this assumes that each security group can only have one (non-terminated) instance at a time. If you get into a state where this is not true, it may be required to clean up your instances manually to get into this state.

Hopefully, EC2 will provide a means in the future for determining how to id machines.