Lab 1: Introduction to

Amazon EC2
Version 1.1.7 (spl200)

Overview

This lab provides you with a basic overview of launching,

resizing, managing, and monitoring an Amazon EC2 instance.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that

provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed
to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
 Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain
and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you
with complete control of your computing resources and lets you
run on Amazon's proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces
the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to
minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and
down, as your computing requirements change.

Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to

pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides
developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and
isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.

Topics covered
By the end of this lab, you will be able to:

• Launch a web server with termination protection enabled

• Monitor Your EC2 instance
• Modify the security group that your web server is using to allow
HTTP access
• Resize your Amazon EC2 instance to scale
• Explore EC2 limits
• Test termination protection
• Terminate your EC2 instance

Duration
This lab takes approximately 45 minutes to complete.

Accessing the AWS Management

Console
1. At the top of these instructions, click Start Lab to launch your
lab.
A Start Lab panel opens displaying the lab status.
2. Wait until you see the message "Lab status: ready", then click
the X to close the Start Lab panel.
3. At the top of these instructions, click AWS
This will open the AWS Management Console in a new browser tab.
The system will automatically log you in.

Tip: If a new browser tab does not open, there will typically be
a banner or icon at the top of your browser indicating that your
browser is preventing the site from opening pop-up windows.
Click on the banner or icon and choose "Allow pop ups."
4. Arrange the AWS Management Console tab so that it displays along
side these instructions. Ideally, you will be able to see both
browser tabs at the same time, to make it easier to follow the
lab steps.

Task 1: Launch Your Amazon EC2

Instance
In this task, you will launch an Amazon EC2 instance
with termination protection. Termination protection prevents you
from accidentally terminating an EC2 instance. You will deploy
your instance with a User Data script that will allow you to
deploy a simple web server.
5. In the AWS Management Console on the Services menu, click EC2.
6. Click Launch Instance

Step 1: Choose an Amazon Machine

Image (AMI)
An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) provides the information required
to launch an instance, which is a virtual server in the cloud.
An AMI includes:
• A template for the root volume for the instance (for example, an
operating system or an application server with applications)
• Launch permissions that control which AWS accounts can use the
AMI to launch instances
• A block device mapping that specifies the volumes to attach to
the instance when it is launched
 The Quick Start list contains the most commonly-used AMIs. You
can also create your own AMI or select an AMI from the AWS
Marketplace, an online store where you can sell or buy software
that runs on AWS.
7. Click Select next to Amazon Linux 2 AMI (at the top of the list).

Step 2: Choose an Instance Type

Amazon EC2 provides a wide selection of instance types optimized
to fit different use cases. Instance types comprise varying
combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity
and give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of
resources for your applications. Each instance type includes one
or more instance sizes, allowing you to scale your resources to
the requirements of your target workload.
You will use a t2.micro instance which should be selected by
default. This instance type has 1 virtual CPU and 1 GiB of
memory. NOTE: You may be restricted from using other instance
types in this lab.
8. Click Next: Configure Instance Details

Step 3: Configure Instance Details

This page is used to configure the instance to suit your
requirements. This includes networking and monitoring settings.

The Network indicates which Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) you wish
to launch the instance into. You can have multiple networks,
such as different ones for development, testing and production.
9. For Network, select Lab VPC.
The Lab VPC was created using an AWS CloudFormation template
during the setup process of your lab. This VPC includes two
public subnets in two different Availability Zones.

10. For Enable termination protection, select Protect against

accidental termination.
When an Amazon EC2 instance is no longer required, it can
be terminated, which means that the instance is stopped and its
resources are released. A terminated instance cannot be started
again. If you want to prevent the instance from being
 accidentally terminated, you can enable termination
protection for the instance, which prevents it from being
terminated.
11. Scroll down, then expand Advanced Details.
A field for User data will appear.
When you launch an instance, you can pass user data to the
instance that can be used to perform common automated
configuration tasks and even run scripts after the instance
starts.
Your instance is running Amazon Linux, so you will provide
a shell script that will run when the instance starts.
12. Copy the following commands and paste them into the User
data field:
13. #!/bin/bash
14. yum -y install httpd
15. systemctl enable httpd
16. systemctl start httpd

echo '<html><h1>Hello From Your Web Server!</h1></html>' > /var/www/html/ind

ex.html

The script will:

o Install an Apache web server (httpd)

o Configure the web server to automatically start on boot
o Activate the Web server
o Create a simple web page
17. Click Next: Add Storage

Step 4: Add Storage

Amazon EC2 stores data on a network-attached virtual disk
called Elastic Block Store.
You will launch the Amazon EC2 instance using a default 8 GiB
disk volume. This will be your root volume (also known as a
'boot' volume).

14. Click Next: Add Tags

Step 5: Add Tags

 Tags enable you to categorize your AWS resources in different
ways, for example, by purpose, owner, or environment. This is
useful when you have many resources of the same type — you can
quickly identify a specific resource based on the tags you have
assigned to it. Each tag consists of a Key and a Value, both of
which you define.
15. Click Add Tag then configure:
o Key: Name
o Value: Web Server
16. Click Next: Configure Security Group

Step 6: Configure Security Group

A security group acts as a virtual firewall that controls the
traffic for one or more instances. When you launch an instance,
you associate one or more security groups with the instance. You
add rules to each security group that allow traffic to or from
its associated instances. You can modify the rules for a
security group at any time; the new rules are automatically
applied to all instances that are associated with the security
group.
17. On Step 6: Configure Security Group, configure:
o Security group name: Web Server security group
o Description: Security group for my web server
In this lab, you will not log into your instance using SSH.
Removing SSH access will improve the security of the instance.

18. Delete the existing SSH rule.

19. Click Review and Launch

Step 7: Review Instance Launch

The Review page displays the configuration for the instance you
are about to launch.

20. Click Launch

A Select an existing key pair or create a new key pair window
will appear.
 Amazon EC2 uses public–key cryptography to encrypt and decrypt
login information. To log in to your instance, you must create a
key pair, specify the name of the key pair when you launch the
instance, and provide the private key when you connect to the
instance.
In this lab you will not log into your instance, so you do not
require a key pair.

21. Click the Choose an existing key pair drop-down and

select Proceed without a key pair.
22. Select I acknowledge that ....
23. Click Launch Instances
Your instance will now be launched.

24. Click View Instances

The instance will appear in a pending state, which means it is
being launched. It will then change to running, which indicates
that the instance has started booting. There will be a short
time before you can access the instance.
The instance receives a public DNS name that you can use to
contact the instance from the Internet.
Your Web Server should be selected. The Description tab
displays detailed information about your instance.
To view more information in the Description tab, drag the
window divider upwards.
Review the information displayed in the Description tab. It
includes information about the instance type, security settings
and network settings.
25. Wait for your instance to display the following:

• Instance State: running

• Status Checks: 2/2 checks passed
Congratulations! You have successfully launched your first
Amazon EC2 instance.

Task 2: Monitor Your Instance

Monitoring is an important part of maintaining the reliability,
availability, and performance of your Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and your AWS solutions.
26. Click the Status Checks tab.
With instance status monitoring, you can quickly determine
whether Amazon EC2 has detected any problems that might prevent
your instances from running applications. Amazon EC2 performs
automated checks on every running EC2 instance to identify
hardware and software issues.
Notice that both the System reachability and Instance
reachability checks have passed.
27. Click the Monitoring tab.
This tab displays Amazon CloudWatch metrics for your instance.
Currently, there are not many metrics to display because the
instance was recently launched.

You can click on a graph to see an expanded view.

Amazon EC2 sends metrics to Amazon CloudWatch for your EC2

instances. Basic (five-minute) monitoring is enabled by default.
You can enable detailed (one-minute) monitoring.
28. In the Actions menu, select Instance Settings Get System
Log.
The System Log displays the console output of the instance,
which is a valuable tool for problem diagnosis. It is especially
useful for troubleshooting kernel problems and service
configuration issues that could cause an instance to terminate
or become unreachable before its SSH daemon can be started. If
you do not see a system log, wait a few minutes and then try
again.

29. Scroll through the output and note that the HTTP package
was installed from the user data that you added when you created
the instance.
30. Click Close
31. In the Actions menu, select Instance Settings Get
Instance Screenshot.
This shows you what your Amazon EC2 instance console would look
like if a screen were attached to it.
 If you are unable to reach your instance via SSH or RDP, you
can capture a screenshot of your instance and view it as an
 image. This provides visibility as to the status of the
instance, and allows for quicker troubleshooting.
32. Click Close
Congratulations! You have explored several ways to monitor your
instance.

Task 3: Update Your Security

Group and Access the Web
Server
When you launched the EC2 instance, you provided a script that
installed a web server and created a simple web page. In this
task, you will access content from the web server.

33. Click the Description tab.

34. Copy the IPv4 Public IP of your instance to your clipboard.
35. Open a new tab in your web browser, paste the IP address
you just copied, then press Enter.
Question: Are you able to access your web server? Why not?
You are not currently able to access your web server because
the security group is not permitting inbound traffic on port 80,
which is used for HTTP web requests. This is a demonstration of
using a security group as a firewall to restrict the network
traffic that is allowed in and out of an instance.
To correct this, you will now update the security group to
permit web traffic on port 80.

36. Keep the browser tab open, but return to the EC2 Management
Console tab.
37. In the left navigation pane, click Security Groups.
38. Select Web Server security group.
39. Click the Inbound tab.
The security group currently has no rules.

40. Click Edit then configure:

o Type: HTTP
o Source: Anywhere
o Click Save
41. Return to the web server tab that you previously opened and
refresh the page.
You should see the message Hello From Your Web Server!
Congratulations! You have successfully modified your security
group to permit HTTP traffic into your Amazon EC2 Instance.

Task 4: Resize Your Instance:

Instance Type and EBS Volume
As your needs change, you might find that your instance is over-
utilized (too small) or under-utilized (too large). If so, you
can change the instance type. For example, if a t2.micro instance
is too small for its workload, you can change it to
an m5.medium instance. Similarly, you can change the size of a
disk.

Stop Your Instance

Before you can resize an instance, you must stop it.
When you stop an instance, it is shut down. There is no charge
for a stopped EC2 instance, but the storage charge for attached
Amazon EBS volumes remains.
42. On the EC2 Management Console, in the left navigation pane,
click Instances.
Web Server should already be selected.
43. In the Actions menu, select Instance State Stop.
44. Click Yes, Stop
Your instance will perform a normal shutdown and then will stop
running.

45. Wait for the Instance State to display: stopped

Change The Instance Type

46. In the Actions menu, select Instance Settings Change
Instance Type, then configure:
o Instance Type: t2.small
o Click Apply
When the instance is started again it will be a t2.small, which
has twice as much memory as a t2.micro instance. NOTE: You may be
restricted from using other instance types in this lab.
 Resize the EBS Volume
47. In the left navigation menu, click Volumes.
48. In the Actions menu, select Modify Volume.
The disk volume currently has a size of 8 GiB. You will now
increase the size of this disk.

49. Change the size to: 10 NOTE: You may be restricted from
creating large Amazon EBS volumes in this lab.
50. Click Modify
51. Click Yes to confirm and increase the size of the volume.
52. Click Close

Start the Resized Instance

You will now start the instance again, which will now have more
memory and more disk space.

53. In left navigation pane, click Instances.

54. In the Actions menu, select Instance State Start.
55. Click Yes, Start
Congratulations! You have successfully resized your Amazon EC2
Instance. In this task you changed your instance type
from t2.micro to t2.small. You also modified your root disk
volume from 8 GiB to 10 GiB.

Task 5: Explore EC2 Limits

Amazon EC2 provides different resources that you can use. These
resources include images, instances, volumes, and snapshots.
When you create an AWS account, there are default limits on
these resources on a per-region basis.

56. In the left navigation pane, click Limits.

Note that there is a limit on the number of instances that you
can launch in this region. When launching an instance, the
request must not cause your usage to exceed the current instance
limit in that region.

You can request an increase for many of these limits.

 Task 6: Test Termination
Protection
You can delete your instance when you no longer need it. This is
referred to as terminating your instance. You cannot connect to
or restart an instance after it has been terminated.
In this task, you will learn how to use termination protection.
57. In left navigation pane, click Instances.
58. In the Actions menu, select Instance State Terminate.
Note that there is a message that says: These instances have
Termination Protection and will not be terminated. Use the Change
Termination Protection option from the Instances screen Actions
menu to allow termination of these instances.
Also, the Yes, Terminate button is dimmed and cannot be clicked.
This is a safeguard to prevent the accidental termination of an
instance. If you really want to terminate the instance, you will
need to disable the termination protection.

59. Click Cancel.

60. In the Actions menu, select Instance Settings Change
Termination Protection.
61. Click Yes, Disable
You can now terminate the instance.

62. In the Actions menu, select Instance State Terminate.

63. Click Yes, Terminate
Congratulations! You have successfully tested termination
protection and terminated your instance.

Lab Complete
Congratulations! You have completed the lab.
64. Click End Lab at the top of this page and then click Yes to
confirm that you want to end the lab.
A panel will appear, indicating that "DELETE has been
initiated... You may close this message box now."
65. Click the X in the top right corner to close the panel.
For feedback, suggestions, or corrections, please email us
at: [email protected]

Additional Resources
• Launch Your Instance
• Amazon EC2 Instance Types
• Amazon Machine Images (AMI)
• Amazon EC2 - User Data and Shell Scripts
• Amazon EC2 Root Device Volume
• Tagging Your Amazon EC2 Resources
• Security Groups
• Amazon EC2 Key Pairs
• Status Checks for Your Instances
• Getting Console Output and Rebooting Instances
• Amazon EC2 Metrics and Dimensions
• Resizing Your Instance
• Stop and Start Your Instance
• Amazon EC2 Service Limits
• Terminate Your Instance
• Termination Protection for an Instance