CS 4530/7530 Cloud Computing I

Spring 2020
Lab # 1 – AWS Account Setup and Services Overview
Dr. Prasad Calyam (Contact: [email protected])
TA: Chengyi Qu (Contact: [email protected])

1. Purpose of the Lab

Understand definitions of various Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their use in cloud computing
based web applications that are accessible over the Internet through an AWS account.

2. References to guide Lab work

- Chapter 1, Distributed and Cloud Computing, Hwang, Fox & Dongarra
- Chapter 1, Programming Amazon EC2, Vliet and Paganelli
- AWS Free Usage for Education:
o Overview of AWS, http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Overview.pdf
o Services on the free usage tier, http://aws.amazon.com/free/
- AWS Documentation: http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/
- AWS Reference Architectures: http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/
- General AWS Reading: T. Morgan, “A Rare Peek Into The Massive Scale of AWS”, Nov.
2014 - http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/11/14/rare-peek-massive-scale-aws/
- AWS educational resources (AWS credit, training, learning resources)
https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/

3. Lab Steps and output collection guidelines

AWS Add AWS Add a

Amazon Web AWS Launch
Account Education Credit Bill
Services Architecture instance
Creation for $100 Alarm
Figure 1: Lab 1 Steps Overview

The Figure 1 shows the required steps to be followed in order to successfully create an account
credited with funds for this course. You will need to understand pricing conditions and services
documentation related with ‘AWS free usage tier’, understand AWS Architecture, create your
‘AWS account’. You will launch your first AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instance. Finally, you
will use AWS CloudWatch to add a Bill alarm for monitoring and managing your credit.

Let’s get started!

3.1 Amazon Web Services

Take your time in order to understand the conditions of free usage that involve free account
availability, restrictions in terms of instance types, pay-as-you-go service rates, operating
systems that are under the free usage condition, and free usage accumulation, detailed
information can be found on http://aws.amazon.com/free/.

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 Go through the http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/ to find detailed information of each
service that AWS provides. Pay special attention to the service groups: Getting started with
AWS, Compute, Storage & Content Delivery and Database.

3.2. AWS Architecture Center

You will need to understand overall http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/ to help you build your
application architecture customized according to your requirements, and for maximizing the AWS
services usage. Web application hosting related customization example is shown below in Figure 1.

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 Figure 1: Example application customization of AWS architecture

3.3. AWS Account Creation

1. AWS Educate classroom – email invite
You would have received email invite to join AWS Educate classroom as shown below. Click on the
AWS educate link to sign in.

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 2. Open your browser and copy and paste the link you received in the email.

https://www.awseducate.com/signin/SiteLogin

3. Please create an AWS educate account to sign in if you don’t have one.

Note: AWS educate account is not same as your AWS account. Even though you have an active
AWS account you still have to create educate account using your university email.

4. AWS Educate Portal

• After successful login you should be able to see all the options available in AWS educate.
• Feel free to navigate each option and explore the website.
• Click on ” My Classrooms” in the navigation menu.

5. Cloud computing classroom in AWS Educate

• Please verify that you have $100 AWS credits as a part of this classroom. Click on “Go to
classroom” to access all the materials of this classroom.

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6. This is your classroom portal. You can know more about AWS services offered as a part of AWS
educate account by clicking on the FAQ questions.

• Click on “AWS Console” to access all the AWS cloud services.

• Take a look at your account information, this is the AWS educate classroom account.
• Spend some time exploring all the services. They have very good getting started guides for all
the services. Especially, watch videos and earn Badges (see top menu).
• To start with, let’s explore the EC2 service. Please click on the EC2. If it is not displayed you can
search for it by typing in “EC2” in the search bar.

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3.5 Launching your first AWS Instance

Figure 3: Overview of an AWS Instance

Figure 3 shows the instance architecture to be configured in this Lab. Using your AWS account, you will
launch a virtual instance created in a new ‘Volume’ from an Amazon EBS-backed instance snapshot
(called ‘Root’), in order to access your reserved infrastructure resources over the Internet; you will need
to create key pairs and secure it through a security group; all the infrastructure will be created in a
specific zone.

3.5.1 Click ‘Services’, make sure to select the US East (N. Virginia) region in the top-right part of your
screen and select EC2 service (Elastic Compute Cloud).

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3.5.2 In left menu, select “Key Pairs” under “Network & Security” option.

 Click on “Create Key Pair” and create a key pair called ‘key-ec2’ and store it in a safe location, you
will need this key for the future labs. (Note: create pem key if you are using MacOS, create ppk key
if you are using Windows OS (for putty usage). )

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3.5.3 Select “Security Groups” from the left menu, name a Security Group ‘SG_EC2’, add description
and a SSH rule with ‘anywhere’ option selected in source field.

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 Example of Security Group creation.

3.5.4 Launch your Instance

 In left menu, launch a new instance in the ‘Instances’ option Click on the ‘Launch Instance’ button
and select the first Image of ‘Amazon Linux’ on the list

 Select the t2.micro instance that is ‘Free’.

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 Check to see that there are 7 steps in launching an instance and you are in the second step at the
moment. Click on “Next: …” button at the bottom right corner. Keep default values in the next
configuration windows and continue until you get to the ‘Add tags’ option. Add ‘Key’ and ‘Value’ as
shown in figure below and click on ‘Next: Configure Security Group’.

 Select the ‘Security Group’ created previously and click on ‘Review and Launch’.

 Once you click ‘launch’ you will be prompted to choose the key pair ‘key-ec2’ created previously.
Acknowledge and click on “Launch Instances” button.

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 In a short time, your new instance will be deployed and ready to be used. In the “Launch Status”
page (the one you are currently in), click on “View Instances” button. Check the “Instance State”
column. It should say running. If not, you can wait for a few seconds. It shouldn’t take long.

Note: You should turn off any instances after each session – otherwise this can deplete the
credits

Stop your instance.

In your AWS EC2 service select ‘Instances’ under ‘INSTANCES’ option, select your running instance, click
on ‘Actions’ button and ‘Stop’ option.

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4. What to turn in for Grading?
(Report with answers to below questions should be turned in at the beginning of the class on the due date; don’t
forget to write your name and title (e.g., Lab X) on the reports)

1. List any 4 AWS web services for each of the following categories: Database, Storage, Analytics,
Compute, Networking & CDN, Machine Learning, Security, Identity & Compliance and Application
Integration.

2. Explain the purpose of any 8 AWS services from the ones listed in Question 1 (write in your own
words).

3. List the Free Tier details for the instance type used in this lab (i.e., Family, vCPUs, Memory, Instance
Storage and Network Performance)

4. Some AWS services have been built with fault tolerance and high availability in mind. Referring to the
AWS Architecture documentation, list the services that are inherently fault tolerant and provide high
availability. What other services do not inherently provide these benefits, and how does one add these
capabilities within those services?

5. Describe the necessity of ‘Amazon Machine Image (AMI)’ and ‘security group’ customization in ‘Web
Application Hosting’ as described in the AWS Architecture documentation.

6. AWS recently presented a Quick Start Reference deployment guide that discusses architectural
considerations and steps for deploying security-focused baseline environments (NIST-800-53). The ‘Best
Practices’ presented in the guide helps users to build a ________________ and ____________
architecture. See link for reference: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/quickstart/latest/accelerator-
nist/welcome.html

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