AWS EC2 — Management Console
A Blog post to explain the basic concepts of AWS EC2(Amazon Web Service Elastic Compute Cloud) service.
AWS EC2 is a web service that provides a scalable compute capacity that is on-demand, pay-per-use basis . EC2 is simply based on server virtualization which provides unlimited set of machines with almost of unlimited capacity. As a AWS user we generally call these machines as an “instance”. Users can dynamically create,work,expand EC2 instances as per use and as per requirement.
In next few steps we will explore how a user can create or manage instances via AWS graphical user interface(GUI). Please jump to AWS EC2 CLI to perform same set of process via Command line interface(CLI).
Prerequisite:
- AWS Console Access i.e. a valid account on AWS Portal.
- A valid user with permission of creation and deletion of AWS EC2 instances.
Steps:
- Login to console
Login to AWS Management console and select EC2 from available services.
2. Select Launch Instance
Click on Launch Instance to spin up a new EC2 instance.
3. Choose an AMI (Amazon Machine Image)
Amazon AMI’s are basically pre-configured OS images. There are variety of images available on aws like windows, red-hat, Ubuntu, SUSE etc. select an AMI as per requirement and need. For our demo we will be going to pick a RHEL image.
4. Choose an Instance Type
Type of instance defines the capacity and configuration for our instance.
5. Configure Instance details
Next step is to configure our system with set of configurations like network and sub-net configurations(VPC),number of instances to be launched, instance access configurations(IAM) & shutdown behavior. Please follow below screen for the setup.
6. Add Storage
Step where we configure Or attach additional storage volumes to our instance as per our requirement/needs.
Please note EBS i.e. elastic block storage is a term generally used for storage volumes in AWS.
7. Assign Tags
Optionally you can assign a/the tag/s to your instance i.e. to useful names Or Organization name for future references and tracking.
8. Create Security Groups
Security Groups are the virtual firewall for aws cloud that is used to setup various set of rules for incoming and outgoing traffic from/to your instances.
Here we are allowing SSH default port i.e. port 22 to allow ssh access to our instance.
9. Review and Launch
Review your configurations and Launch :-)
10. Key-pair
Before final launch , aws ask us to generate a key-pair i.e. public and private key combination to provided an access to the machine. Private key will be shared and is user downloadable and public key will be kept with aws and on the servers to validate against the private key.
A. Select option — Create a new key-pair and provide a name for it.
B. Download key-pair.
C. Once downloaded Click Launch Instances
11. Launch Status
Go ! Launch ! and jump to EC2 dashboard to see the status of all your instances.
12. Check Details
Select an instance to see the attached details or properties associated with an instance like IP/VPC/State/Region etc.
13. Connect to an instance
Let’s connect to our instance as same is now up & running. For details , right click on a running instance and click on connect and that will pop up the below screen i.e. descriptive steps to connect to your instance.
Use default terminal/shell to SSH onto your EC2 instance for linux boxes Or putty from a windows machine.
SSH → ssh -i <key-pair> ec2-user@<IP of EC2 instance>
14. Cleanup
Its always a good practice to terminate an unused instances i.e. to save overall aws costing.
As, soon as instance state changes to terminated , we are done.
Credits : AWS
— A Blog by teckdevOps
