EC2 No-Frills Recipe

What follows is a no-frills, bare bones, recipe for a free-while-it-lasts tier compute instance on AWS. They are my notes from a lesson I'm following.

As with most things I post on here, it's slim on helpfulness (read: details) and fat on aiding my poor memory-making circuits. Your mileage will vary. But if you like gists of things, read on:

Glossary

Recipe

1. Before you do anything, ensure you're in the intended region (eg. I'm using US East (N. Virginia) ). You can usually set zones/regions while creating stuff... but eyes can glaze over, y' know? Best to start on the good foot.

2. Find EC2 service in AWS and click to launch a new instance:

   • Machine Image : just pick the first one (Amazon Linux 2 AMI)
   • Instance Types : select a T2 micro
   • do check "protect against accidental termination". click next
   • Add Storage : seriously - just click next
   • Tags : whatever nobody cares spawn whatever labels you want. Next.

   • Security Groups : K start paying attention:

     • wire up the ports you want to open, remembering that cidr values of 0.0.0.0/0, ::0/0 basically mean publicly accessible to all and sundry. Which is the sort of thing you'd want for a web server. For other things... not so much. Click launch ! :)

   • Keypair Prompt : This whole endeavour will require assymetric encryption, so:

     • if you already have a key pair, you'd like to use, select that and skip the steps below. Otherwise
     • select create a new keypair in the dropdown box, then:
     • Give it a name
     • Cannot emphasises this enough: DOWNLOAD THE PRIVATE KEY RIGHT AWAY and store it in a safe place. (AWS will keep a copy of the public key)
3. Wait for AWS to spin up your shiny new server! You will see it's been assigned an a public ip address, amongst other things.

4. SSH to your instance*:

   • Your username will always be ec2-user so connecting boils down to variants of ssh ec2-user@<ip-address> -i <keyname>.pem presuming you're not on a public network or similar that blocks port 22.
   • Another (easiest?) way is to install the Secure Shell App chrome extension*, import a key pair (2 key files), and then come back and click the connect button for your instance.

5. Update all packages (as root user)

   > sudo su
   > yum update -y

6. The box is up to date - now do / install whatever you like! like a wee testable, reachable web server:

   yum install httpd -y
   cd /var/www/html
   touch index.html
   vi index.html
   service httpd start
   chkconfig on