Rolling your own EC2 administration code: the basics

So, instead of using a PaaS or SaaS to manage the IaaS, I'm writing code myself to do exactly what I want, to be published shortly I hope. Basic ingredients:

• A library to access EC2, like Typica.
• An SSH library like JSch, to exec commands and transfer files.
• A templating engine for wrangling config files, such as Velocity.
• Working knowledge of the platform. I'm probably going to discover a few more subtleties such as this one before I'm finished.

Aside: Maven2 may be looked upon with scorn in certain circles, but it does make life much easier. If certain packages included javadoc & source packages, and refrained from (e.g.) including log4j config files in the library JAR files, it would be even easier! Wouldn't that be nice.