Launching a virtual machine on Amazon EC2 Instance
Having established itself as an early leader in the market for cloud infrastructure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the online retailer’s profitable cloud platform, is still ahead of the pack. As I started learning about cloud computing I realised that it’s way easier than I thought specially when it comes to creating a virtual machine. Let’s take a look at how to create a virtual machine using Amazon EC2.
What is Amazon EC2?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. — Amazon AWS
Now that we know about EC2 let’s get started with creating our virtual machine.
Getting Started
- Create a free AWS account
Head over to this link and create your free account.
2. In the AWS management console click Launch a virtual machine
3.Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
An AMI is a template that contains the software configuration (operating system, application server, and applications) required to launch your instance. You can select an AMI provided by AWS, our user community, or the AWS Marketplace; or you can select one of your own AMIs.
I’m gonna use ubuntu as my AMI.
4. Select t2.micro
5. Click Review and Launch
This will choose default settings for the other steps. Feel free to go through them. for now I’m gonna skip that part and gonna launch my instance
6. Create a key pair
We need to create a key pair that we gonna need when we are going to connect to the VM.
7. Download your key and click Launch Instances
8. Done. Congratulations! you created your first virtual machine instance using EC2
Now let’s connect to the instance that we created. You can follow the instructions to connect to the VM.
As you can see you can create your VM easily within few steps using Amazon EC2.
This was about creating a virtual machine using Amazon EC2. Please make sure to go through the full documentation to learn more about AWS and EC2. See you guys on the next one. Until then stay safe! ✌️
References:
[1]. Amazon AWS.[2021] Docs [Online]. Available at: https://aws.amazon.com/ [Accessed 31 March 2021]
