Amazon EC2 Instance

An EC2 Instance is a virtual server in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for running applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows us to choose the best optimal configureation for the Amazon Machine Image (AMI). It further provides with complete control of your computing resources that meets the best requirement for runing cloud environment

In this blog, I will try to show the steps for Launching a EC2 instance:

  • Aws_ami
  • Selecting Instance Type
  • Security Groups
  • EC2 termination

AWS Management Console

The AWS Management Console is the UI for a secure, easy-to-access and web-based portal for navigating different AWS Services

AWS home

AWS AMI

An AWS Amazon Machine Image is a template for software configuration which includes OS, applicaton server, and applications required to launch your instance. There are different AMI you can choose for your running instance. AWS Marketplace also provides different AMIs. We will select the free-tier AMI for this tutorial.

AWS AMI

Launching and Selecting the Instance Type

After Launching new Instance we can select diferrent types of Instances based on storage, memory, Network perofrmance, Type, vCPUs. We can select the free Instance type for the tutorial.

Instance Type

Storage

Selecting the Security Groups

When launching new AWS AMI instance we also need to specify security groups. A security group acts as a virtual firewall for you instance to contorl inbound and outbound traffic. We can assign upto five security groups to the instance.

NOTE: Security groups act at the instance level, not the subnet level whereas Network ACLs are tied to subnet level

Security Groups

Key Pair

After selecting the appropriate instance type and configuratoin settings, we have the option to select an existing key pair or create a new key pair. A key pair consisits of public key that AWS stores, and a private key file that you store. Together, they allow you to connect your instance securely.

Key Pair

Checking the EC2 Instance Status

We can view the status for the existing and new launched EC2 instance on the EC2 Dashboard.

instance_status