I use the stackster to manage stacks, however I understand how to connect to different regions / accounts as well as kick off a deployment on instances.

Getting Started

Install the gem

gem install simple_deploy

Create a file ~/.simple_deploy.yml and include within it:

deploy:
  gateway: ADMIN_IP_TO_YOUR_VPC
  user: SSH_USER_TO_GATEWAY_AND_INSTANCES
  key: PRIVATE_SSH_KEYFILE_FOR_USER
  artifacts: 
    - name: live_community_chef_repo
      bucket_prefix: intu-lc
      variable: CHEF_REPO_URL
      cloud_formation_url: ChefRepoURL
    - name: live_community
      bucket_prefix: intu-lc
      variable: APP_URL
      cloud_formation_url: AppArtifactURL
    - name: cookbooks
      bucket_prefix: intu-artifacts
      variable: COOKBOOKS_URL
      cloud_formation_url: CookbooksURL
  script: /opt/intu/admin/bin/configure.sh

environments:
  preprod_shared_us_west_1:
    access_key: XXX
    secret_key: yyy
    region: us-west-1

Configuration File

The configuration file supports additional optional deployment parameters. Artifacts can have an endpoint specified to be passed in (by default they pass in the s3 url).

Deploy can have a ssh user and key set. These will be used to connect to both the gateway and tunnel through to instances.

Commands

You can issues the following commands:

simple_deploy environments
simple_deploy list -e ENVIRONMENT
simple_deploy create -n STACK_NAME -e ENVIRONMENT -a ATTRIBUTES -t TEMPLATE_PATH
simple_deploy update -n STACK_NAME -e ENVIRONMENT -a ATTRIBUTES
simple_deploy deploy -n STACK_NAME -e ENVIRONMENT
simple_deploy destroy -n STACK_NAME -e ENVIRONMENT
simple_deploy instances -n STACK_NAME -e ENVIRONMENT
simple_deploy status -n STACK_NAME -e ENVIRONMENT
simple_deploy attributes -n STACK_NAME -e ENVIRONMENT
simple_deploy events -n STACK_NAME -e ENVIRONMENT
simple_deploy resources -n STACK_NAME -e ENVIRONMENT
simple_deploy outputs -n STACK_NAME -e ENVIRONMENT
simple_deploy template -n STACK_NAME -e ENVIRONMENT

Attribute pairs are = seperated key value pairs.  Multiple can be specified.  For example:

simple_deploy create  -t ~/my-template.json -e my-env -n test-stack -a arg1=val1 arg2=vol2

For more information, run simple_deploy -h.