AWS : Creating a Virtual Machine with EC2

Through this article, I am going to explain the steps required to create the Virtual Machine with EC2 from AWS (Amazon Webservice) Management Console. Assuming you have the account to use AWS Management Console.

Step 1. Log in to “AWS Management Console”.

Step 2. Under the Build Solution group, click on the “Launch a virtual machine” link. AWS will open a wizard to allow us to create a Virtual Machine instance (EC2 instance).

Step 3. Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that contains the software configuration required to launch the EC2 instance. Select the AMI which is suitable for your need by clicking on the Select button next to the displayed AMI template. Once selected, the Console will take us to the next step to select an instance from the “Choose an Instance Type” wizard page.

Note: By clicking the “Free tier only” checkbox, will display the AMIs which are qualified for the Free tier.

Step 4. Select the instance type which suits our requirement, and click on “Next: Configure Instance Details” to go to the next wizard step.

Note: Free tier eligible entries will be shown in the list, with “Free tier eligible” text under the entries in the Type column.

Step 5. “Configure Instance Details” allows you to configure the instance to suit your requirements. Keep the default values, if you do not want to modify anything.

• Give a number of instances value in the “Number of instances” field; to launch the number of instances from the same selected AMI.
• You can assign the access management role to the Instance through the “IAM role” field.

Once the necessary values are entered, click on the “Next: Add Storage” button to add the storage to the instance(s).

Step 6. The “Add Storage” wizard page, allows you to update the storage device settings. You can also add new volumes depending on your requirements. Once the values are given, click on the “Next: Add Tags” button.

Step 7. After adding the Tags, click on the “Next: Configure Security Group” button.

Step 8. “Configure Security Group” wizard allows to add rules to control the traffic for the EC2 instance. For example, you can add rules to allow to access the EC2 instance from known IP addresses only. Once required changes are done, click on the “Review and Launch” button.

Step 9. Before launching the instance, AWS Management Console will prompt a message, to create a key pair entry to attach to the instance. You can create a new key pair or you can use the already created one. This key pair is important to connect to the EC2 instance. Key pair contains both public & private keys. You need to download the Key Pair and store it in a secured location from where you can access it whenever you want to connect to the EC2 instance.

Provide the “Key pair name” & click on the Download Key Pair button to download the key pair file (*.pem file). Once downloaded, click on the Launch Instances button to launch the EC2 instances.

Step 10. If everything goes fine, you will see the “Your instances are now launching” message. And you can also review the settings you have done. Click on the “View Instances” button to view the instances which we created just now through the above steps.

Step 11. You can see the list of instances and their statuses on the instances page. Now the EC2 instance is ready, which means, your own virtual machine is ready. Everything is ready; then how to connect to it.?

Step 12. Click on Connect button, which is on top of the EC2 instances page. AWS Management Console will display the steps to connect to the EC2 instances. You can connect to EC2 instances, using an SSH client or through a web browser.

I will explain the steps on connecting to EC2 instance using SSH client, in my next article.

[..] David