How to Set Up an Amazon EC2 Instance

This tutorial is part of a series on setting up Scalable Web Hosting with Amazon EC2

If you have not already done so, you should register for an Amazon EC2 account. Follow the instructions provided to generate and save your login credentials.

For this tutorial, we will use the AWS Management Console. Login to the Management Console. On the home screen, make sure the tab EC2 is selected. Your screen will look something like this (with likely all zeros in the “My Resources” section):

Click on the “Launch Instances” button. You will be presented with series of default machine images.  Choose the “Basic Fedora Core 8″ Image. Note that there is an option that has the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) already configured. For the sake of this tutorial, we are going to do it from scratch. For practical reasons, I like to control my install setup rather than going with pre-configured options anyway.

Now, enter in a name for the key you would like to create, and save it in a secure place on your local machine. We will need it for SSH login purposes later:

Now we will setup basic firewall access for SSH (we will fix the web server and database firewall access later):

Now, enter 1 for the number of instances, and select Launch!

It make take a few minutes for your instance to start up. Once the Instances screen shows a status of  “running”, click on your server to see its configuration details. We are particularly interested in the Public DNS that was assigned. Make a note of this.

Now we have everything we need to login and manage our server through SSH. Continue on to our next tutorial on “Loging in to an Amazon EC2 Instance Using PuTTY