Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) : Part 3: Launch An Instance

In Part 1 and Part 2, I talked about creating an Amazon AWS account and setting up access credentials. In this part, I will talk about launching an instance.

•  Sign in to the AWS Management Console, then click the EC2 tab. You should see a screen like the screenshot blow.

• If you don't have any key pairs, you can click the Key Pair link under My Resources section to create a key pair.

• Click the Create Key Pair tab.

• Enter a Key Pair Name and click Create. Save the generated private key to your computer. After a key pair is created, go back to the EC2 Console Dashboard. Click the Launch Instance Button to start an EC2 instance.

• From the Request Instances Wizard, you can choose an Amazon Machine Image that meets your needs.  I'll choose the first one, Basic 32-bit Amazon Linux AMI 2011.09.

• Choose an Instance Type (I choose Micro here), and click Continue. In next screen, use all default values and click Continue.

• Add tags to your instance and click Continue. I use Name for the Key and my_demo for the Value.

• Pick up an existing Key Pair or create a new one for connecting to your instance if it launches.

• Configure Firewall: You can use an existing security group or create an new one. I'm going to create a group here. Click Create a new Security Group radio button, enter a name. Pick up a rule from Create a new rule dropdown box and click Add Rule button. You can define as many rules as you want.

• Final Review. Everything looks good. Click Launch.

Congratulations, Your first Amazon EC2 instance is up and running!  I will talk about connecting to Amazon EC2 instance in part 4.