Using Amazon Web Services’ EC2 for the first time

This is more a commonplace reference than a tutorial.

To start and access an EC 2 server instance on AWS is actually pretty straightforward -

• Create an AWS account
• Navigate to the EC2 dashboard
• Launch an EC2 instance

You will be taken through a series of screens. For most of these screens, just use the default settings. Just remember to do two important steps -

• In the Security Group pane, remember to set the following:

- SSH: Port Range: 22, Source: Anywhere

- HTTP: Port Range: 80, Source: Anywhere

- HTTPS: Port Range: 443, Source: Anywhere

- Custom TCP Rule: Port Range: 8888, Source: Anywhere

• In the final pane, just before you launch, AWS will ask you to select a key pair. Choose to create a new key pair, and save the resulting file containing the key to your computer (something like ‘xxx.pem’.)

And finally, when all is done and the EC2 instance is up and running (on the AWS EC2 dashboard), try to use your terminal to SSH into the server.

Steps are pretty simple.

• Open an SSH client. (Mac users can just use the Terminal. For Windows users, find out how to connect using PuTTY)
• Locate your private key file (xxx.pem) that you downloaded from AWS earlier
• Use this line to set permissions if necessary chmod 400 iPython.pem
• Connect to your instance using its public DNS or IP. It should look something like this ssh -i “xxx.pem" ubuntu@ec2-54-214-109-204.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com