AWS Immersion Day

EC2 Hands-On Lab

Getting Started with Linux on Amazon EC2

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EC2 Overview
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute
capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure
capacity with minimal friction. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server
instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing
requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only
for capacity that you actually use.

This lab will walk you through launching, configuring, and customizing a web server on Amazon EC2
using the AWS Management Console.

Create a new Key Pair

In this lab, you will create an EC2 instance as your web server. To manage the instance, you need to be
able to connect to it via SSH. The following steps outline how to create a unique SSH keypair for this
purpose.

1. Sign into the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon EC2 console at
https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2.

2. In the upper-right corner of the AWS Management Console, confirm you are in the desired AWS
region (e.g., N. Virginia).

3. Click on Key Pairs in the NETWORK & SECURITY section near the bottom of the leftmost menu.
This will display a page to manage your SSH key pairs.

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4. To create a new SSH key pair, click the Create Key Pair button at the top of the browser window.

5. In the resulting pop up window, type [First Name]-[Last Name]-ImmersionDay into the Key Pair Name: text
box and click Create.

6. The page prompt you to download the file “[First Name]-[Last Name]-ImmersionDay.pem” to the local drive.
Follow your browser instructions to save the file to the default download location.

7. Remember the full path to this .pem file you just downloaded. This file contains your private key for future
SSH connections.

You will use the Key Pair you just created to manage
your EC2 instances for the rest of the lab.

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Launch a Web Server Instance
In this example, we will launch an Amazon Linux 2 instance, bootstrap Apache/PHP, and install a basic
web page that will display information about our instance.

Sign into your AWS Management Console and choose EC2 from the Services menu.

Upon logging into your AWS Console, you should ALWAYS

check which region you are operating in. This can be found in
the top right of your Console window.

8. Click on Launch Instance

9. In the Quick Start section, select the first Amazon Linux 2 AMI for 64-bit (x86) architecture and
click Select. Note that the ami-xxxxxxxxx label and specific versions of the installed package may
be different than in the image below.

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10. In the Step 2. Choose an Instance Type, select the t2.micro instance size and click Next: Configure
Instance Details.

If it isn't labeled "Free Tier Eligible", you may incur a charge!

11. On Step 3. Configure Instance Details page, expand the Advanced Details section located at the
bottom of the page, then, copy/paste the script below into the User Data field. This shell script
will install Apache & PHP, start the web service, and deploy a simple web page. Click Next: Add
Storage.

'User data' is a method for bootstrapping your

instance - Any code placed here will be executed the
first time an instance is launched.

#include
https://s3.amazonaws.com/immersionday-labs/bootstrap.sh

12. On this page you have the ability to modify or add storage and disk drives to the instance. For this
lab, we will simply accept the storage defaults and click Next: Add Tags.

13. Here, you can choose a “friendly name” for your instance by clicking ‘Add Tag’, and entering
“Name” for the Key part and “[Your Name] Web Server” for the Value part. This Name key, more
correctly known as a tag, will appear in the console once the instance launches. It makes it easy to
keep track of running machines in a complex environment. Click Next: Configure Security Group.

14. You will be prompted to create a new security group, which will be your firewall rules. On the
assumption that we are building out a Web server, name your new security group “[Your Name]
Web Tier”, and confirm an existing SSH rule exists which allows TCP port 22 from Anywhere. Click

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 Add Rule.

15. Add now another rule with HTTP from the ‘Type’ dropdown menu, and confirm TCP port 80 is
allowed from Anywhere (you’ll notice, that “Anywhere is the same as ‘0.0.0.0/0’). Click Add Rule.

16. Click the Review and Launch button after configuring the security group.

17. Review your cofiguration and choices, and then click Launch.

18. Select the key pair that you created in the beginning of this lab from the drop-down and check the
"I acknowledge" checkbox. Then click the Launch Instances button. Your instance will now be
starting, which may take a moment.

19. Click the View Instances button in the lower right hand portion of the screen to view the list of
EC2 instances. Once your instance has launched, you will see your Web Server as well as the
Availability Zone the instance is in, and the publicly routable DNS name.

20. Click the checkbox next to your web server to view details about this EC2 instance.

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Browse the Web Server
1. Wait for the instance to pass the Status Checks to finish loading.

Finished initializing

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Open a new browser tab and browse the Web Server by entering the EC2 instance’s Public DNS name
into the browser. The EC2 instance’s Public DNS name can be found in the console by reviewing the
“Public DNS” name line highlighted above.

You should see a website that looks like the following:

If you don’t see the web page (and you’ve waited a sufficient
time for the instance to boot), try rebooting the instance via
the console. Can you find it??

Great Job! You have deployed a server and launched a web site in a matter of
minutes!!

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