Starting an EMR job with Boto

I've noticed there are not many articles about boto and Amazon web services. Although boto's documentation is quite good, it lacks some practical examples. Most specifically, I found quite a fair amount of RTFM was needed to get an elastic map reduce job started on Amazon using Boto (and I did it from Google app engine, just to go full cloud!). So here it goes, a very basic EMR job launcher using boto:

zone_name = 'eu-west-1'
access_id = ...
private_key = ...

# Connect to EMR
conn = EmrConnection(access_id, private_key,
                    region=RegionInfo(name=zone_name,
                    endpoint= zone_name + '.elasticmapreduce.amazonaws.com'))

# Create a step for the EC2 instance to install Hive
args = [u's3://'+zone_name+'.elasticmapreduce/libs/hive/hive-script',
            u'--base-path', u's3://'+zone_name+'.elasticmapreduce/libs/hive/',
            u'--install-hive', u'--hive-versions', u'0.7.1']
start_jar = 's3://'+zone_name+ \
            '.elasticmapreduce/libs/script-runner/script-runner.jar'
setup_step = JarStep('Hive setup', start_jar, step_args=args)

# Create a jobflow using the connection to EMR and specifying the
# Hive setup step
jobid = conn.run_jobflow(
                    "Hive job", log_bucket.get_bucket_url(),
                    steps=[setup_step],
                    keep_alive=keep_alive, action_on_failure='CANCEL_AND_WAIT',
                    master_instance_type='m1.medium',
                    slave_instance_type='m1.medium',
                    num_instances=2,
                    hadoop_version="0.20")

# Set the termination protection, so the job id won't be killed after the
# script is finished (that way we can reuse the instance for something else
# Don't forget to shut it down when you're done!
conn.set_termination_protection(jobid, True)

s3_url = 'Link to a Hive SQL file in S3'
args = ['s3://'+zone_name+'.elasticmapreduce/libs/hive/hive-script',
        '--base-path', 's3://'+zone_name+'.elasticmapreduce/libs/hive/',
        '--hive-versions', '0.7.1',
        '--run-hive-script', '--args',
        '-f', s3_url]

start_jar = 's3://'+zone_name+'.elasticmapreduce/libs/script-runner/script-runner.jar'
step = JarStep('Run SQL', start_jar, step_args=args)
conn.add_jobflow_steps(jobid, [step])