It’s a very good practice to scan your perimeter from the outside of your network, simulating an attacker. However, you will need to deploy the scanners somewhere to do this. Hosting on Amazon EC2 can be a good and cost-effective option, especially if you start instances with vulnerability scanners only when it’s necessary and keep them stopped at other time.
So, in this post I will give some examples of how to manage Amazon instances automatically using the AWS CLI or Python SDK (boto3): start/stop the instance and get public ip address.