2022 TUTORIAL: LEARN HOW TO CREATE AN AWS INSTANCE USING THE NEW EC2 LAUNCH EXPERIENCE

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com’s cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services, that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. With EC2 you can deploy an instance for almost any use case such as deploying a dynamic website or e-commerce store, deploying a WINDOWS SERVER application or service, protecting your on premise computers with a AWS cloud hosted Active Directory solution, deploying a cloud firewall or intrusion detection and prevention system, creating a cloud based VPN solution to link multiple branch locations and a lot more! With the AWS GLOBAL infrastructure you can deploy EC2 instances in almost any location in the world allowing your to provide your applications and services to customers and end users at low latency speeds. In this tutorial you will learn how to create an AWS INSTANCE using the new EC2 INSTANCE LAUNCH EXPERIENCE – Amazon EC2 Console introduces the new and improved launch experience – a quicker and easier way to launch an instance. The new design provides a single page layout allowing you to view all your settings in one location. You no longer need to navigate back and forth between steps to ensure your configuration is correct. The new design also introduces a summary panel, that provides an overview and helps navigate the page.

REQUIREMENTS

In order to complete this tutorial, the following is a list of items that may be needed or required. Please ensure to have these items available before taking implementation action on this tutorial to ensure success:
1) A desktop or laptop with 4GB RAM, a dual core processor and atleast 50GB of free disk space
2) A web browser i.e Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Mozilla Firefox
3) An AWS free tier account.
4) Or an AWS IAM user account with access rights to create and manage EC2 instances
5) A basic understanding of virtual machines and cloud computing

OVERVIEW

1) Login to your AWS account or sign up for an AWS free tier account.
2) Use the search bar at the top of the page to search for EC2
3) Click on the EC2 search result to open the EC2 management console
4) Use the new EC2 LAUNCH experience to create a new instance
5) View your newly created instance on the EC2 dashboard.

STEP 1: Login to your AWS account or sign up for an AWS free tier account.

1) The first step in learning how to create an AWS instance using the new EC2 INSTANCE LAUNCH experience is to login into your AWS account. Click HERE to go to the AWS login page. Type in your IAM ID, username and password to gain access.

STEP 2: Use the search bar at the top of the page to search for EC2

2) On the EC2 CONSOLE HOME, type in the word EC2 on the search bar at the top and on the search results that are returned. Click on EC2 to open up the EC2 management console.

STEP 3: Use the new EC2 LAUNCH experience to create a new instance

3) On the EC2 MANAGEMENT CONSOLE, click on LAUNCH INSTANCE then click on LAUNCH INSTANCE.

4) On the LAUNCH AN INSTANCE page, type in a name to identify the instance on the NAME input box.

5) On the APPLICATION AND OS IMAGES section, you now need to select an AMAZON MACHINE image that you would like to use to deploy your instance. An AMI is like an ISO image file for the system or operating system that you would like to deploy in the cloud. You can either select a ready made AMI on the QUICK START tab or alternatively, click on BROWSE MORE AMI’s and click on AWS MARKETPLACE AMI’s.

6) Use the search bar at the top to search for the AMAZON MACHINE IMAGE that you would like to use and on the returned search results click on the SELECT button on the image that you would like to use.

7) Next, scroll down to the INSTANCE type section and select the type of instance you would like to use to deploy the AMAZON MACHINE IMAGE (AMI). Instance types come with different system specifications such as amount of memory, disk storage and number of processors and the choice of which instance type to use depends on the amount of compute resources that you need. If you would like to stay within the confines of the AWS FREE TIER, select the T2.MICRO instance type or any instance flagged as free tier eligible.

8) On the KEY PAIR (LOGIN) section select an existing KEY PAIR or click on the CREATE NEW KEY to generate a new key pair .pem file that will allow you to securely connect to your instance remotel via ssh.

9) On the NETWORK SETTINGS section, ensure that the CREATE SECURITY GROUP option is selected as well as the ALLOW SSH TRAFFIC FROM check box. You can either set it to 0.0.0.0/0 to allow SSH traffic to your instance from anywhere or you set an IP address or IP ADDRESSES that are permitted to connect to your instance via SSH. If you would also like to access your instance via HTTP and/or HTTPS click on the ALLOW HTTPS TRAFFIC FROM THE INTERNET and / or ALLOW HTTP TRAFFIC FROM THE INTERNET check boxes.

10) On the CONFIGURE STORAGE section, type the size the of the SSD disk size that you would like your EC2 instance to have. Please note that if you are using a FREE TIER account the size of the disk is limited to 30GB of EBS general purpose SSD. If you allocate more that 30GB then you will have pay for the additional storage space that you would like.

11) If you would to make some more advanced customizations for your instance such as settin an INSTANCE PROFILE, instance auto recovery, shutdown behaviour, stop – hybernate behaviour or termination protection, simply expand the ADVANCED DETAILS section and make the selections that you would to have.

12) On the SUMMARY section, you can now view a list of all the selection that you have made. If you would to make any changes simply scroll back up to the specific section and make changes or adjustments as you wish to. However if there are no changes to be made you can select the number of instances you would to create on the NUMBER OF INSTANCES input box.

Once you have set the number of instances to create click o the CREATE INSTANCE button to complete the instance creation process.

13) You now need to wait for the instance creation process to complete and if you would like to view details of the creation process click on the VIEW DETAILS button.

STEP 4: View your newly created instance.

14) Once the instance creation process is complete, click on the VIEW INSTANCES button to view your newly created INSTANCE.