My data scientist doesn’t know how to properly start an EC2 instance

While this a useful post to help those tasked with managing infrastructure, your title suggests a Jack-of-all-trades approach. Stikes me asking a data scientist to deploy EC2 instances is a waste of valuable skills.

It is preferable for a data scientist to spend her valuable skills on understanding the problem domain, adapting data to modeling the problem and interpreting results. With the shortage of qualified data scientist this seems to be analogous to asking a commerical airline pilot to be able to carry out a jet engine overhaul.