Ec2 (aws) - delete snapshots

Ec2 snapshots are a way to make backups of your data into the amazon cloud. To do snapshots you will need the ec2-api-tools, your access key and secret or the x509 certificates for your aws account. Obviously after you snapshot you will need eventually to delete snapshots that you don't need anymore. This example shows how to use the ec2-api-tools into a shell to delete snapshots that are not part of the current month. You can have a cronjob that runs every last day of the month, this will give you almost 30 days of snapshots.

# describe snapshots and sort by date
ec2-describe-snapshots -C cert.pem  -K key.pem | sort -k 5

# delete all but current month (not the last 30 days)
ec2-describe-snapshots -C cert.pem  -K key.pem | grep -v $(date +%Y-%M-) |  awk '{print $2}' | xargs -n 1 -t ec2-delete-snapshot -K key.pem -C cert.pem