I’ve been working heavily with Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce (EMR) lately to run analysis jobs on hadoop. During development I often have to ssh into the master node of the cluster and the constant copying/pasting of DNS names or job-ids was starting to get annoying. I wrote this function to automatically log me in to an ssh session with the most recently created active master node and put it in my .bashrc.

A bit of configuration of the elastic-mapreduce CLI is required (see here).