AZURE CLOUD ENGINEERING

We are going to create a machine using the web console.

Our goal is to create a web server using Nginx. This is a quick start, some concepts will be detailed in the next sections if this course.

You need to go to aws.amazon.com and type your login and password.

Note that in this part of the training, I am using the AWS default VPC. If you already deleted it, you can restore it by going to your VPC configuration, then create a new one:

You can find the link to access EC2 under the Compute menu, or you can search for it by simply typing “ec2”.

Now you should choose the region you want to use for your EC2 virtual machine.

I used to use Ireland as a region since it is the cheapest nearest region to me. This may not be the case for you but you can see more details on pricing here.

Click on “Launch Instance”:

This will take you to this screen where you should choose the operating system to use:

I am going to use Ubuntu, choose your own OS and click on “Select”. You will be redirected to the second screen where you should use the machine size.

Now you can use the t2.micro instance (Free tier eligible).

After clicking on “Next”, you will be asked to provide the configuration for your virtual machine. Keep everything as it is and enable “Auto-assign Public IP”.

Click on “Add Storage”. Keep everything as it is for the moment and click on “Add Tags”.

Click on “click to add a Name tag” and add aws-tutorial as “Name”.

Choose “Next” and click on “Create a new security group”, add a security group name (I name it “aws-tutorial-sg”) and the description you want (add a description that will help you to remember why this security group was created), then allow SSH, HTTP & HTTPS from everywhere:

In “source”, choose “custom” and add

0.0.0.0/0

Click on “Review and Launch” then on “Launch”. If this is the first time you’ll use AWS and EC2, you will be asked to create a key pair that will allow us to ssh into the created machine.

Give your key pair a name and download it to keep it in a safe place.

I usually move this to my home folder and this is what I am going to do in this tutorial.

When you finish downloading the key pair, you can click on “Launch Instances” then on “View Instances”.

Wait for the initialization to finish and right-click on the instance, then click on “Connect”. You will see this screen with the SSH command you should use in order to get into the machine.

If you are using Linux, Mac OS or Ubuntu on Windows you can use your terminal with the given command.

If you are using Windows, Putty is a known and widely used SSH client that you can use but we recommend using Bash.

The command used to SSH into the machine looks similar to this:

ssh -i "aws-tutorial.pem" ubuntu@ec2-34-253-210-158.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com

• “aws-tutorial.pem” is the certificate name or path that allows us to ssh to the created machine
• “ubuntu” is the username
• “ec2-34-253-210-158.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com” is the hostname

Every OS has a default username that should be used. Here is a list of some of them:

I moved the key pair from my “Download” folder to my “Home ” folder and I executed the command given by AWS connection popup.

You can probably get an error message similar to this one:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@         WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!          @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Permissions 0644 for 'aws-tutorial.pem' are too open.
It is required that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.
Load key "aws-tutorial.pem": bad permissions
Permission denied (publickey).

This is a permission problem that could be fixed using chmod:

chmod 0400 aws-tutorial.pem

Once we made an SSH into the created machine, we can start installing Nginx:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y nginx

Now let’s get back to the console and check the public IP address that our machine is using. We can see this is the web dashboard:

Our public IP is

34.253.210.158

When typing this in my browser, I can see that Nginx was successfully installed:

You can do the same using the IP address that AWS assigned to your virtual machine and check if everything is working fine!