[Note] Start first instance on Amazon Web Service EC2

How-to guide by Amazon
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/GettingStartedGuide/

Amazon have become the largest cloud service company that provide compute instance and stroage
in their data center, that we can rent those computing resource as instances.

What's EC2?
Elastic Compute Cloud, the amazon computing service, we can rent an instance and run service on it as a virtual machine.

Amazon also have other service like S3 - simple storage service , is a storage service that you can upload file and let other people download. S3 provide auto bitTorrent support for big files.

Start an Instance

Login Amazon Aws console , choose EC2 tag, press "launch instance button"

1. Choose Instance Type: AMI(amazon machine image)
Default has Amazon custom Linux, Suse Linux and Windows Server 2003, both 32bit and 64bit.
There's also community AMI you can choose (which have CentOS and Ubuntu)

Read ubuntu document to find official AMI for ubuntu: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EC2StartersGuide

ami-06ad526f for free micro instance supported Ubuntu 11.04 , check the Star mark for free support or not.
The root device ebs means the data will be saved in ebs service by default, which will not disappear after shutdown,

2. Select number of instance, instance type (related to money, micro is free)

3. Advance Instance Option: kernel, ramdisk id, monitoring, import user data shutdown behavior
you can import your userdata as text or file, that's useful when setting up multiple instances, you don't have to set user separately.

4.key-value tag to administrate multiple instances, and help to manage
ex: Owner = Jimmy
Admin = Jimmy
Service = Redmine
Stack = Development

5.choose key-pair to login with ssh , pem format (see below for how to login)

6.choose security group
Decided which incoming network traffic should be delivered to your instance
- access web traffic on port 80
- Its like the firewall setting, need to add every open port for usage (black-listed)
- SSH:22, windows RDP(Remote Desktop Protocol)
- source : 0.0.0.0/0 means no restriction on ip/submask
- 192.168.2.0/24 means restriction on 192.168.2 sub-area

How to login?

pem: public key of a specific certificate. Apache use this kind of certificate.
In apache installs, this frequently resides in /etc/ssl/servercerts.
it is also called X.509 Certificates

terminal:
# ssh -i ~/.ssh/XXX.pem root@ec2-##-##-##-##.compute-1.amazonaws.com

connection in windows using Putty:
generate private key from .pem file using puttygen,
choose Load => XXX.pem
then save private key XXX.ppk

Connection with putty under windows
choose connection => auth => load private key

More on aws:

EC2 command line tool: using command line to manage EC2 Instance
need to apply X.509 keypair for Amazon EC2 AMI Tools,
Amazon Web Services > Your Account > Security Credentials > X.509 Certificate