Amazon EC2: Getting started (Part 1/2)

EC2 = Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

In this post we will create EC2 Micro instance.

For now Amazon EC2 has been my weapon of choice for testing out stuff. Instances are easy to launch and if you run it for couple of hours its basically free.

This is very simple guide that runs trough the process of creating a virtual machine in Amazon infrastructure.

I'm not going to cover signing up part, but its easy to do just follow the instructions. You need a valid credit card in order to register.

If you are registering first time to AWS, you will be eligible for Amazon's free tier!

Yes! Free micro instance for 12-months, the performance is not going to rock your world buts its alright to run small website on it. More information about free-tier here

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Once you get your account done you can log into your AWS Console. As you can see EC2 is only one part Amazon Web Services, we are not covering any other services than EC2 now.

Click EC2 to proceed.

Next up its importat to choose correct region in upper left navigation bar. If you are setting up your instance for your personal testing use, its good to choose region nearest to you.

Once the region is selected hit "Launch Instance" button in the middle of the screen.

You can either use classical wizard or quick launch, both do the same but in our case Quick launch is quicker (duh) and correct image seem to be at the first page (Ubuntu Server 12.04.1 LTS)

Next set the name for your instance and set the name for your Key Pair. You must also download your key from the Download button next to Name field.

Key Pair? Yes, Amazon provides public/private key pairs, public key goes into your virtual machine and you will be using private key. These keys must match in order to establish a connection to your server.

You can only download this file once while creating the key pair so don't loose it! So I'm going to choose 64-bit Ubuntu server, you can use whatever you want.

Then we review our instance, we have Type t1.micro it is a Micro instance, it has 613 MB of memory poor I/O performance. But for testing purposes it will do fine. Personally at this point i would rename security group since it cannot be renamed afterwards.

You can create your custom security group if you click "Edit details". Check " Create new Security Group", name it and set some kind of description for it. From the "Create a new rule" Dropdown you select predefined groups, choose what you need and click "Add Rule". Here you could restrict from what source IP addresses can access your service, default 0.0.0.0/0 means everyone. 

After you are finished, click Create

Click Save details, then you will return to review windows and click Launch.

Continue to part 2

Generate .ppk out of .pem with Linux (Ubuntu)

Here is a example how to convert .pem to .ppk using Ubuntu.

First you need to install package putty-tools

 sudo apt-get install putty-tools  

After install, all you really need to do is this:

 puttygen key.pem -o key.ppk  

But.. with -P switch you can set passphrase for extra security, this is recommended and easy to do:

 puttygen key.pem -o key.ppk -P -C "My server key"  

It is also recommended to set comment for your key using -C switch, because this string will be prompted to you when you are entering your passphrase.

Note that you can also change passphrase afterwards by using -P switch

 m@box:~/Downloads$ puttygen -P key.ppk   
 Enter passphrase to load key:   
 Enter passphrase to save key:   
 Re-enter passphrase to verify:   

And you are done!

Setting up LAMP in Ubuntu Server

This guide will take you trough process of installing fully functional LAMP server in Ubuntu. You can setup this easily in few minutes.

 sudo apt-get update  
 sudo tasksel  

Move to LAMP server and check it by pressing space, then click TAB to move to Ok and press Enter.

tasksell will download and install all necessary packets for you. Next you must enter MySQL root password and confirm it.








Once install is completed, verify it by connecting to http://<your public dns or ip>/

You should see this:

Yup! it works, now we will set up phpmyadmin for administrating MySQL

 sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin  

Setup will automatically configure phpmyadmin for you.

Select "apache2" from the list by pressing space

Configure database for phpmyadmin with dbconfig-common? -> Yes

Here you must enter your MySQL root password. The one you entered earlier!

Enter password for application password for phpmyadmin

This is password for user "phpmyadmin" that will be used for communication between MySQL Server and phpmyadmin.

And we are set again, verify installation by visiting http://<your public dns or ip>/phpmyadmin

You can log in using "root" and your MySQL root password or with "phpmyadmin" and application specific password.