Warning: This section is under construction

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, affectionately referred to as "EC2", is AWS’s virtual compute offering.

If you need a machine other than your personal computer to run some tasks on, but don’t want to deal with hardware, then EC2 is one of several options.

Digital Ocean would be another option.

Launching an instance

It’s fairly easy to launch an instance through the AWS console.

Instance type

Instance type is important to specify appropriately as it directly impacts how performant the cloud machine will be as well how much money will be burned per hour.

t2.micro (linux) = 0.0116 USD per hour, which equates to about $8.50 per month.

Warning Let’s say you run a c3.4xlarge instance by accident. That will be 0.84 USD per hour, which is about $613 per month. ☠️

Key pair (login)

Create an RSA encrypted, .pem formatted key pair used for SSH-ing into the instance.

The console provides a few helpful instructions.

# ensure your key is not publicly viewable
chmod 400 test_ec2.pem

# Connect to your instance using its Public DNS
ssh -i Downloads/test_ec2.pem ec2-user@ec2-??-???-???-??.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Network settings

AWS networking always leaves me feeling lost and inadequate. I’ll report back here when I learn more.

The one important setting to check is:

• Allow SSH traffic from 0.0.0.0/0.

Though this is not the most secure, the .pem key requirement serves as reasonable line of defense against bad actors.

Security groups

A default security group will likely get auto-created upon instance launch. It’ll be named something like launch-wizard-2.

Allowing inbound SSH traffic from 0.0.0.0/0 results in an inbound rule like

%% using GitHub container registry
graph TD
    R53("Route53")
    LB("Load Balancer")
    TG("Target group")
        Human --https://waypoint.thekevinwang.com-->R53
        R53 --> LB
        LB --Listener:80--> TG
        LB --Listener:443--> TG
    subgraph AWS
        ACM
        TG
        R53
        subgraph security group
            LB
            Instance
        end
    end

    subgraph public
        Human
    end

    R53 -..-> ACM
    LB -..-> ACM
    TG --HTTPS: 443--> Instance -.:9702.-> Instance

Configure storage

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Advanced details

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