AWS Basics:

Creating EC2 Instances (with Linux)

 AWS Basics: Creating EC2 Instances (with Linux)

Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................ 3
Objectives .............................................................................................................................................................. 3
Prerequisites .......................................................................................................................................................... 3
Background................................................................................................................................................................ 4
Amazon EC2 .......................................................................................................................................................... 4
Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) ........................................................................................................................... 4
Instance Types and Families ................................................................................................................................. 4
Regions and Availability Zones (AZs) .................................................................................................................... 5
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) ................................................................................................................... 6
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) ........................................................................................................................ 6
Instance Store and EBS-Backed Instances ........................................................................................................... 6
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) ..................................................................................................................... 7
EC2-Classic and EC2-VPC .................................................................................................................................... 7
Security Groups ..................................................................................................................................................... 7
Public and Private IP Addresses............................................................................................................................ 7
Amazon EC2 Instance IP Addressing .................................................................................................................... 7
Elastic IP Addresses (EIPs) ................................................................................................................................... 8
EC2 Overview Diagram ......................................................................................................................................... 8
Additional Information ............................................................................................................................................ 8
Hands-On Exercise.................................................................................................................................................... 9
Start your qwikLAB™ ............................................................................................................................................. 9
AWS Management Console................................................................................................................................. 10
Launch a Linux Instance ...................................................................................................................................... 11
Configure the Linux Instance ............................................................................................................................... 18
Connect to the web server ................................................................................................................................... 19
Assign a Static IP Address................................................................................................................................... 19
Summary ................................................................................................................................................................. 23
Appendix A - Connecting to your EC2 Instance via SSH ........................................................................................ 24
Windows .................................................................................................................................................................. 24
OS X and Linux........................................................................................................................................................ 26

Copyright © 2013 Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
This work may not be reproduced or redistributed, in whole or in part,
without prior written permission from Amazon Web Services, Inc.
Commercial copying, lending, or selling is prohibited.

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 AWS Basics: Creating EC2 Instances (with Linux)

Introduction
Objectives
This lab leads you through the steps to launch and configure your first virtual machine in the Amazon cloud.

You will learn about:

 Using Amazon Machine Images to Launch Amazon EC2 Instances

 Creating Key Pairs for SSH Authentication
 Securing Network Access to Amazon EC2 Instances with Security Groups
 Automatically Configuring Amazon EC2 Instances with Bootstrapping Scripts
 Attaching Elastic IPs to Amazon EC2 Instances to Provide Static Internet Addresses

At the end of this lab you will have deployed a simple web server which includes an informational page to display
details of your virtual web server instance.

Prerequisites
To successfully complete this lab, you should be familiar with basic Linux server administration and comfortable
using the Linux command-line tools.

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 AWS Basics: Creating EC2 Instances (with Linux)

Background
Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the
cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It
provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing
environment. 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. Amazon EC2
provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure
scenarios.

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a special type of pre-configured operating system and virtual application
software which is used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It serves as
the basic unit of deployment for services delivered using EC2.

An AMI contains all information necessary to boot an Amazon EC2 instance with your software. An AMI is like a
template of a computer's root volume. For example, an AMI might contain the software to act as a web server
(Linux, Apache, and your web site) or it might contain the software to act as a Hadoop node (Linux, Hadoop, and
a custom application). You launch one or more instances from an AMI. An instance might be one web server
within a web server cluster or one Hadoop node.

Instance Types and Families

You can launch different types of instances from a single AMI. An instance type essentially determines the
hardware of the host computer used for your instance. Each instance type offers different compute and memory
capabilities. Select an instance type based on the amount of memory and computing power that you need for the
application or software that you plan to run on the instance. You can launch multiple instances from a single
AMI.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types are grouped into the general families described in
the following table.

Family Description

Micro Provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and enable you to burst CPU capacity when
additional cycles are available. They're well-suited for lower throughput applications and websites
that consume significant compute cycles periodically.

Standard Have memory-to-CPU ratios suitable for most general-purpose applications.

Cluster Have a very large amount of CPU coupled with increased networking performance. They're well-
Compute suited for High Performance Compute (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound
applications.

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Family Description

High CPU Have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM). They're well-suited for compute-
intensive applications.

High I/O Provide tens of thousands of low-latency, random I/O operations per second (IOPS) to an
application. They're well-suited for NoSQL databases, clustered databases, and OLTP (online
transaction processing) systems.

High Have proportionally more memory resources. They're well suited for high-throughput applications,
Memory such as database and memory caching applications.

High Provide very high storage density and high sequential read and write performance per instance.
Storage They are well-suited for data warehousing, Hadoop/MapReduce, and parallel file systems.

Cluster GPU Provide general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs), with proportionally high CPU and
increased network performance for applications that benefit from highly parallelized processing.
They're well-suited for HPC applications as well as rendering and media processing applications.

High- Have large amounts of memory coupled with high CPU and network performance. These
Memory instances are well suited for in-memory analytics, graph analysis, and scientific computing
Cluster applications.

Regions and Availability Zones (AZs)

Amazon EC2 is hosted in multiple locations world-wide. These locations are composed of regions and Availability
Zones. Each region is a separate geographic area. Each region has multiple, isolated locations known as
Availability Zones. Amazon EC2 provides you the ability to place resources such as instances In multiple
locations. Resources aren't replicated across regions unless you do so specifically.

Each region is completely independent. Each Availability Zone is isolated, but the Availability Zones in a region
are connected through low-latency links. The following diagram illustrates the relationship between regions and
Availability Zones.

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 AWS Basics: Creating EC2 Instances (with Linux)

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data,
at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable,
secure, fast, inexpensive infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service
aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block level storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances.
Amazon EBS volumes are network-attached, and persist independently from the life of an instance. Amazon EBS
provides highly available, highly reliable, predictable storage volumes that can be attached to a running Amazon
EC2 instance and exposed as a device within the instance. Amazon EBS is particularly suited for applications
that require a database, file system, or access to raw block level storage.

Instance Store and EBS-Backed Instances

When you launch an Amazon EC2 instance, the root device volume contains the image used to boot the instance.
When we introduced Amazon EC2, all AMIs were backed by Amazon EC2 instance store, which means the root
device for an instance launched from the AMI is an instance store volume created from a template stored in
Amazon S3. After we introduced Amazon EBS, we introduced AMIs that are backed by Amazon EBS. This
means that the root device for an instance launched from the AMI is an Amazon EBS volume created from an
Amazon EBS snapshot. You can choose between AMIs based by Amazon EC2 instance store and AMIs backed
by Amazon EBS. We recommend that you use AMIs backed by Amazon EBS, because they launch faster and
use persistent storage.

Instances that use instance store for the root device automatically have instance store volumes available, with
one serving as the root device volume. When an instance is launched, the image that is used to boot the instance
is copied to the root volume. Any data on the instance store volumes persists as long as the instance is running
and is deleted when the instance fails or terminates.

Instances that use Amazon EBS for the root device automatically have an Amazon EBS volume attached. When
you launch an Amazon EBS-backed instance, we create an Amazon EBS volume for each EBS snapshot
referenced by the AMI you use. You can optionally use other Amazon EBS volumes or instance store volumes.

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Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) enables you to launch Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources into
a virtual network that you've defined. This virtual network closely resembles a traditional network that you'd
operate in your own data center, with the benefits of using the scalable infrastructure of AWS.

A virtual private cloud (VPC) is a virtual network dedicated to your AWS account. It is logically isolated from other
virtual networks in the AWS cloud. You can launch your AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, into
your VPC. You can configure your VPC; you can select its IP address range, create subnets, and configure route
tables, network gateways, and security settings.

EC2-Classic and EC2-VPC

There are two supported platforms into which you can launch instances: EC2-Classic and EC2-VPC.

Your AWS account is capable of launching instances either into both platforms or only into EC2-VPC, on a region
by region basis. If you can launch instances only into EC2-VPC, we create a default VPC for you. Then, when
you launch an instance, we launch it into your default VPC, unless you create a non-default VPC and specify it
when you launch the instance.

A default VPC combines the benefits of the advanced features provided by EC2-VPC with the ease of use of
EC2-Classic. If you have a default VPC and don't specify a subnet when you launch an instance, the instance is
launched into your default VPC. You can launch instances into your default VPC without needing to know
anything about Amazon VPC.

Security Groups
A security group acts as a firewall that controls the traffic allowed to reach one or more instances. When you
launch an instance, you assign it one or more security groups. You add rules to each security group that control
traffic for the instance. You can modify the rules for a security group at any time; the new rules are automatically
applied to all instances to which the security group is assigned.

Security groups for EC2-VPC have additional capabilities that aren't supported by security groups for EC2-
Classic.

Public and Private IP Addresses

All Amazon EC2 instances are assigned two IP addresses at launch: a private IP address (RFC 1918) and a
public IP address that are directly mapped to each other through Network Address Translation (NAT). Private IP
addresses are only reachable from within the Amazon EC2 network. Public addresses are reachable from the
Internet.

Amazon EC2 also provides an internal DNS name and a public DNS name that map to the private and public IP
addresses respectively. The internal DNS name can only be resolved within Amazon EC2. The public DNS
name resolves to the public IP address outside the Amazon EC2 network and the private IP address within the
Amazon EC2 network.

Amazon EC2 Instance IP Addressing

We provide your instances with IP addresses and DNS hostnames. These can vary depending on whether you
launched the instance in the EC2-Classic platform or in a virtual private cloud (VPC).

When you launch an instance, we allocate a private IP address for the instance using DHCP. Private IP
addresses are not reachable from the Internet. Each instance that you launch into a VPC has a default network

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 AWS Basics: Creating EC2 Instances (with Linux)

interface. The network interface specifies the primary private IP address for the instance. If you don't select a
primary private IP address, we select an available IP address in the subnet's range.

Each instance is provided an internal DNS hostname that resolves to the private IP address of the instance in
EC2-Classic or your VPC. We can't resolve the DNS hostname outside the network that the instance is in.

When you launch an instance in EC2-Classic or a default subnet in EC2-VPC, we allocate a public IP address for
the instance. We provide each instance that has a public IP address with an external DNS hostname. We
resolve an external DNS hostname to the public IP address of the instance outside the network of the instance,
and to the private IP address of the instance from within the network of the instance.

Elastic IP Addresses (EIPs)

An Elastic IP address (EIP) is a static IP address designed for dynamic cloud computing. With an EIP, you can
mask the failure of an instance by rapidly remapping the address to another instance. Your EIP is associated with
your AWS account, not a particular instance, and it remains associated with your account until you choose to
explicitly release it. There's one pool of EIPs for use with the EC2-Classic platform and another for use with your
VPC. You can't associate an EIP that you allocated for use with a VPC with an instance in EC2-Classic, and vice-
versa

EC2 Overview Diagram

The following diagram provides an overview of the concepts and terminology introduced above as well as their
relationships:

Additional Information
This lab guide gives a brief overview of Amazon EC2 concepts. For additional information, please refer to the
official Amazon Web Services Documentation for EC2 at: https://aws.amazon.com/documentation/ec2/

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 AWS Basics: Creating EC2 Instances (with Linux)

Hands-On Exercise
Start your qwikLAB™

1. Start your qwikLAB™

Use the ‘Start Lab’ button to start your lab.
(Hint: If you are prompted for a token, please use one you’ve been given or have purchased.)

You will see the lab creation in progress.

2. Note a few properties of the lab.

a. Duration - The time the lab will run for before shutting itself down.
b. Setup Time - The estimated lab creation time on starting the lab.
c. AWS Region - The AWS Region the lab resources are being created in.

3. Note the AWS Region set for your lab in qwikLAB™

2)
4. Copy the Password provided.

a. Hint: selecting the value shown and using Ctrl+C works best

5. Click the ‘Open Console’ button.

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6. Make sure that you are not logged into any other instances of the AWS console (in a student account or your
own account), as this may cause conflicts when you open the console and log in below for this lab.

7. Login to the AWS Management Console

Enter the User Name ‘awsstudent’ and paste the password you copied from the lab details in qwikLAB™
into the Password field.

Click on the ‘Sign in using our secure server’ button.

In this step you logged into the AWS Management Console using login credentials for a user provisioned
via AWS Identity Access Management in an AWS account by qwikLAB™.

AWS Management Console

1. Select "EC2" from the Console Home

2. Select or confirm that the same AWS Region that you saw in your QwikLab lab screen is already set in the
AWS Management Console

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 AWS Basics: Creating EC2 Instances (with Linux)

Launch a Linux Instance

In this example we will launch a default Amazon Linux Instance with an Apache PHP web server installed on
initialization.

1. Click on Launch Instance:

2. Select Classic Wizard and click Continue:

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3. Depending upon the resources or OS your instance requires, you may select another type. As we require a
Linux instance, select the Basic 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI.

4. Select the T1 Micro (t1.micro) instance type and click Continue:

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5. In the next screen, copy & paste the following initialization script (you may need to type this into a text editor
and copy & paste the results) into the User Data field (this will automatically install and start Apache on
launch). Then click Continue.

#!/bin/sh
yum -y install httpd php
chkconfig httpd on
/etc/init.d/httpd start

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6. Click Continue to accept the default Storage Device Configuration.

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7. Next, choose a “friendly name” for your instance. This name, 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. We named ours “Self-Paced_Lab_1”; however the only thing that matters is whether the name
is meaningful to you. Put the name you choose in the Value field (see below). Then click Continue.

8. The Wizard will select the only EC2 Instance Key Pair in the account, the one created by qwikLAB™.
9. Click Continue.

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10. Create a Security Group, which will be your firewall rules. We named this one “Self-Paced_Lab_1”. Again,
the name is up to you.
a. Make sure to open two ports: 22 (SSH) and 80 (HTTP).
b. Port 22 is there by default.
c. Select Custom TCP Rule, Enter 80 in port range/click add rule.

d. Your TCP Port (Services) list should look like this when complete.

e. Click Continue when finished.

11. Review your choices, and then click Launch.

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12. You will receive a popup window notifying you your instances are launching. Click “Close” to continue.

13. The instance will begin launching.

a. Monitor it to make certain it’s running by navigating to Services/EC2 and the Instances.
b. Click refresh in your browser if the state of the instance appears not to be updating.

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Configure the Linux Instance

The instance has already been customized with the installation of Apache and PHP from the script you entered as
User Data when the instance was launched. Modify the web server by adding the following index.php file.

1. Log in to your instance using SSH. For instructions, see Appendix A - Connecting to your EC2 Instance.
2. The following must be typed at the $ prompt of your SSH session

cd /var/www/html
sudo vi index.php

3. If you are an experienced Linux user, you should know the basics of vi, the default text editor. Otherwise you
may want to check out a vi tutorial. Here’s a tutorial that has everything you’ll need in a single HTML page:
http://www.tjhsst.edu/~dhyatt/superap/vi.html. More documentation is available from then VIM project, the
most popular implementation of vi: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/.

4. After starting vi, to start editing, press “i” to turn on insert mode.

5. Enter the code below.

Note: If you use copy/paste to transfer the code above from the PDF document to vi directly, some characters
may fail to copy correctly, especially some whitespace characters. A known workaround is to copy/paste the
code above into a text editor, then copy/paste the code again from notepad into vi. This is known to get rid of
any inconsistencies.

6. In insert mode, you can place the cursor where you want to paste your copied text, and click the right-mouse
button.

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 AWS Basics: Creating EC2 Instances (with Linux)

<?php
$url = "http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id";
$instance_id = file_get_contents($url);
echo "Instance ID: <b>" . $instance_id . "</b><br/>";
$url = "http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone";
$zone = file_get_contents($url);
echo "Zone: <b>" . $zone . "</b><br/>";
?>

7. Once your text appears, press Escape

8. Type :wq to save and quit.

Note: If for some reason vi is interrupted in the middle of editing (for example through a reboot), then it
will salvage the currently edited file. After starting vi again, it will offer to recover the file for you. Just
follow the instructions and proceed with the instructions above. You may or may not need to change or
delete existing lines using the “i” or “dd” commands in vi.

Connect to the web server

1. Find the DNS name of your instance:

2. Enter the DNS name of your instance into your browser and connect to the server.
a. If successful, you will see your instance ID and Zone appear:

Assign a Static IP Address

AWS offers Elastic IP Addresses (EIPs), which are actually NAT addresses that operate at a regional level. That
is, an Elastic IP Address works across Availability Zones, within a single region.

Let’s assign an EIP to your instance.

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 AWS Basics: Creating EC2 Instances (with Linux)

1. Click on the Elastic IPs link in the AWS Console

2. Click on Allocate New Address

3. You’ll see a confirmation prompt. Click Yes, Allocate

4. After confirmation, you’ll see your newly allocated EIP. Right-click on it and choose Associate from the pop-
up menu.

5. A popup will allow you to associate the EIP with one of your running instances. Choose the instance that you
just launched and click Yes, Associate:

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6. Now your Elastic IP address is associated to your instance:

7. And your instance should now report its new IP address in the console:

8. Now, verify the new IP address of your web server in a browser:

If successful, you will see your instance ID and Zone appear:

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End Your qwikLAB™ Session

1. Sign-out of the AWS Management Console.

2. Click the End Lab button in qwikLAB™.

Give the lab a thumbs-up/down, or enter a comment and click Submit

Errors in this lab guide can be reported to aws-course-feedback@amazon.com

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Summary
Congratulations! You now have successfully:

 Learned about the basic concepts and terminology of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service,
 Created your own Amazon EC2 server instance running Linux in the AWS cloud,
 Modified it to run a web server with a page that displays machine-specific information,
 Assigned a fixed public IP address (Elastic IP) to your instance.

We hope you enjoyed working through this tutorial and that you now have everything you need to start using EC2
for your own projects. Please feel free to explore our other self-paced labs to learn more about Amazon Web
Services.

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Appendix A - Connecting to your EC2 Instance via SSH

Windows
Download PuTTY
1. Download PuTTY to a location of your choice unless you already have PuTTY.
http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty.exe

Download your EC2 Key Pair private key file

2. Go back to your lab in qwikLAB™.
3. Download the qwikLAB™ provided EC2 Key Pair private key file in the PuTTY compatible PPK format by
clicking on the Download PPK option in the “Download PEM/PPK” drop-down.

4. Save the file to your Downloads directory (or some other directory of your choice.)

Connect to the EC2 Instance using SSH and PuTTY.

1. Open the putty.exe you downloaded or already had.
2. Enter ec2-user@<your EC2 hostname> into the Host Name input in Putty (Ctrl+v).
3. Expand the SSH category by clicking on it.

4. Select the Auth category by clicking on it (not the + symbol next to it).

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5. Click Browse and locate the PPK file (ending in .ppk) in your Downloads directory or whatever other
location you chose.
6. Click Open

Click Yes when prompted to allow a first connection to this remote SSH server.

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OS X and Linux
Download your EC2 Key Pair private key file
1. Go back to your lab in qwikLAB™.
2. Download the qwikLAB™ provided EC2 Key Pair private key file in the PEM format by clicking on the
Download PEM option in the “Download PEM/PPK” drop-down.

3. Save the file to your Downloads directory (or some other directory of your choice.)

Connect to the EC2 Instance using the OpenSSH CLI client

1. Open the Terminal application.
2. Enter the below commands substituting the path/filename for the .pem file you downloaded from
qiwkLAB™ and pasting ec2-user@<your EC2 hostname> to substitute the example below.

chmod 600 ~/Downloads/qwiklab‐l33‐5018.pem 
ssh –i ~/Downloads/qwiklab‐l33‐5018.pem ec2‐user@ec2‐23‐22‐87‐238.compute‐1.amazonaws.com 

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