Create an AWS EC2 Instance

This article provides high-level instructions to create an AWS EC2 instance.

Prerequisite

• Register and Create Free Tier AWS Account — Free Cloud Computing Services — AWS Free Tier (amazon.com)

Create AWS EC2 Instance

• Login to AWS Account
• Sign-In to the Console
• Search and locate EC2 Service

• Once you click the EC2 service then you will be redirected to the EC2 dashboard page, there click on Launch instance.

• Select the configurations as per your requirements.
• Give name to the instance.

• Select the Amazon Machine Image

• Then select the instance type and Create Key Pair (required for login)

• Create new security group or select existing security group.

When you set 0.0.0.0/0 it means from anywhere you can access your EC2 instance through SSH and I have also enabled the HTTP traffic on port 80 because I want to expose a web application which I will be deploying on this EC2 instance.

• Select the required storage configurations.
• Once everything is done click launch instance button.

Check the state of EC2 Instance

• Click on View all Instances button.

Access EC2 Instance via Putty

• We need a Key Pair which was created during the EC2 instance creation. By default, we have downloaded the .pem file but putty supports the .ppk file. So, we first need to convert the private key from .pem to .ppk.
• Make a use of puttyGen to convert the file. (install putty if not available)

Windows -> Start Menu -> All Programs -> PuTTY -> PuTTYgen

• Load the .pem file

• Click on save private key, which will save file in .ppk format.

• Open Putty and provide required details.

Username

EC2 instance public IP (you can get this from EC2 instance overview page)

PPK file

• There are other ways also to login to your EC2 instance like direct connect from AWS through browser, using SSH, etc.

Summary

In this article we learned how to create AWS EC2 instance and access same through putty.