How to launch an EC2 Instance on AWS as a Beginner
Amazon Elastic cloud compute (EC2) instance is a virtual machine that offers secure, reliable and high-performance compute infrastructure in a cost-effective way to meet the personal and business compute needs of developers and organizations. In order to launch an EC2 instance as a beginner, you need to have an AWS account on https://aws.amazon.com/. The steps below will guide you to launch your first EC2 instance as a beginner on AWS.
- Navigate to the EC2 dashboard under the compute section of the services tab or by searching “EC2” using the search bar on the AWS console.
2. The EC2 dashboard contains a variety of services which includes Amazon Machine Images (AMI), Elastic Block Store, Network and Security, Load Balancing, and Auto-Scaling. Select the launch instance option on the EC2 dashboard, this leads you to the next stage where you have to set specifications for your EC2 instance.
3. Select a name for your EC2 instance and choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). The AMI contains a pre-installed operating system, and application servers, there is a variety of Linux, Windows, and other OS servers available for you to choose from.
4. Choose an instance type that meets your personal or business compute demands, there are different instance types with varying combinations of CPUs, memory (GB), storage (GB), types of network performance, and availability of IPv6 support for you to select from.
5. In order to ensure that you can securely connect to your EC2 instance, you need to create a key pair or use an existing key pair by selecting the key pair in the key pair (login) section.
6. Under network settings, you can specify a specific VPC network where you intend to launch your instance and configure a security group with firewall rules to control incoming traffic to your instance. You can use the default VPC network and security group.
7. For storage options, you can choose to attach an SSD, HDD or Standard Magnetic drive to your instance and specify the size of storage you want.
8. Under Advanced details, you can set other features and services for your EC2 instance such as shutdown behaviour, termination protection, and tenancy.
9. After specifying the configurations and features for your instance, you can then go ahead to review your instance details and launch the EC2 instance.
10. After your instance has been successfully launched, you can view your EC2 instance under “instances” on the EC2 Dashboard.
11. You can stop, reboot or terminate your EC2 instance using the instance state options after selecting the EC2 instance.
