The idea behind using a service like RightScale in a cloud hosting service like Amazon’s EC2 is that you write a small program to install everything needed on your server. Because of this, you can dynamically turn servers on and off depending on your current traffic.

Where it gets difficult is when you need to install something that requires user input such as when signing a GPG key.

To get around this, you’ll need to come up with a solution that will allow you do finish the task without using user input.

In the example of signing GPG keys, instead I use the –always-trust parameter like this:

gpg –always-trust -ear ‘username’ test.txt

This allows me to encrypt a file in a script without having to answer the Yes/No question of whether I really want to encrypt it or not.

Normally, I would sign the key to avoid this question, but signing the key requires several questions to be answered and I’ve yet to find a way to script their answers.