Creating Your Own Virtual Computer: A Step-by-Step EC2 Instance Guide on AWS

My AWS Article Collection: Exploring a Multitude of Topics

1. Let's Talk about IAM Users in AWS
2. Exploring AWS EC2 Instances: Features, Deployment, and Hands-On Insights (c-sharpcorner.com)

Objective

Elevate Your Tech Proficiency: Elevate your understanding of cloud technology by building your own EC2 instance on AWS. With my user-friendly instructions, you'll gain confidence in navigating the cloud landscape and learn a valuable skillset for the digital age. Start your exploration now!

For this article am choosing the location as US EAST; this is something just random.

Now, search for EC2 in the search box, go over to EC2, and pick up virtual servers in the cloud. This is where we can start creating our virtual servers.

Right now, we can see I don't have any running instances. So, just click on running instances and start creating instances by clicking the instance button.

The below page will appear after clicking on the Launch Instance button

Whenever you would like to create an EC2 instance, a virtual server, what are the decisions you need to make?

Point 1

We need to choose what software we would want on our virtual server.

You need to choose the OS, software & applications that we want to have on our virtual server.

Simply, in AWS we called it as Amazon Machine Image (AMI). This is a template which contains the software configurations.

You can see different types of AMI in the above image belonging to different operating systems. You can see that few of them are free tier eligible.

What is a free tier eligible?

If we use software applications and if you are in the free tier and if we are within the free tier limits, then we don't required to pay for AWS.

Moving forward, what I'll do is choose the first one which is available In here Amazon Linux 2023 AMI.

Point 2

The second decision that we need to make is to choose the instance type. Nothing but Hardware.

Hardware includes CPU Memory storage, networking, and capacity management.

In the below image, you can see a wide variety of instance types provided for us.

If we scroll down, we'll see more than 200+ different types of instances by AWS.

So, depending on our use case, whether we'd want a high amount of CPU, whether we want high amount of storage , we can choose the right instance type.

Here, I will choose general purpose instance type called T2 Micro and I would click on Launch Instance

Once we click on Launch Instance, the EC2 service will ask you to select an existing key pair.

A key pair consists of two keys, a public key that is stored by AWS and a private key that will be stored by us.

So you need to store this private key and have it in a secure place.

Whenever we want to connect to this EC2 instance, which we are creating right now, you would need to provide a private key file.

If you don't have the private key, you cannot connect to the EC2 instance.

Right now, we don't really have a key pair yet, so what we'll do is we'll create a new key Pair.

Let's use the default naming convention, which is EC2-default, and you can actually go ahead and create the key pair.

Once you click on Create Key pair, the pem file will be downloaded to your local folder.

And proceed to the launch instance by clicking on the launch instance.

EC2 Instance Launched successfully

In our next article, let's play around with this created instance. Stay tuned for an engaging adventure into the realm of EC2 instances. Are you ready to dive in?