Understand the EC2 Pricing, Create and Connect to EC2 instance

Understand Pricing

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a range of cloud computing services.
• For each service, you pay for exactly the amount of resources you actually need.
• To Know pricing details, click here.
• For learning purposes, we go through on-demand pricing.
• EC2 is CPU, Memory, and storage.
• Based on what you want to do with EC2 in AWS, the price varies.
• It’s better to choose the free version of Linux instead of Enterprise Linux.
• Once you create the cluster, if you use it or not, charges are applicable on an hourly basis.
• To check the pricing, click here.

E.g.: If we want to build 6 nodes and spend 300 hours of running over a period of 2 months. For 6 instances, total hours will be 1800 hours. If we take m4.Large machines with vanilla Linux configuration which 10 cents as per below image. So the cost will be 1800 * 0.10 = $180 for EC2 machines. If we run the cluster 24 hours in the 2 months (60 days) it will cost us $864 for 1440 (60 * 24) hours.

In the next video, we will see how to create or connect ec2 instance for our requirement.

Create your first EC2 Instance

• Login AWS console
• Understand the which region you are.
• Search or choose EC2 from the services
• Click on the launch instance to create ec2 instance
• Choose an Amazon machine Image(AMI)–You can choose Free Tier or Enterprise based Linux EC2 instance, as per your requirement.
  • Search on AWS marketplace (E.g: Centos)
• Choose an Instance Type (CPU and Memory)
  • Select your instance type, and click next.
    • E.g: General Purpose (t2.large), Compute Optimizes (c5.large) etc.
  • Based on the instance type, machine CPU, memory and storage will be configured for the machine.
• Configure Instance details (Networking)
  • Two important things for server on top of memory and cpu is networking and storage.
  • Choose number of instances that you want to launch and network (default VPC created by amazon).
    • You will get your own VPC (Virtual Private Cloud Name) within ec2 machines
• Add Storage
  • By default, will get 8 GB as part if free tier storage, change the size according to your requirement
  • Choose volume type – Magnetic or SSD
• Add tags
  • Just for your reference, generally Name key will be added.
  • E.g.: Key: Name – Value: centos7freetier
• Configure Security Group or Firewall
  • Choose Create a new security group
  • Enter Security Group Name (E.g:centos7freetierdemo)
  • Only SSH is made available to connect to the system remotely.
• Review
  • If you want to do any changes , you can change any configuration of your machine at this step based on suggestions or requirement.
• Launch the Instance
  • Whenever we provision machine, it will ask you create new keypair.
  • Important to connect the machine, Give the name (E.g: freetierdemo)
  • Download the key pair with .pem extension (Only at this step you can download this file)
  • And then click on Launch instance.

Note: Understand cost associated with each instance before provisioning any instance.

Connecting to EC2 Instance

• Go to AWS Management Console, Choose the instance you want to connect, make sure it is running without any issues and click connect which prompts a window asking Open any available SSH Client.
• In this video, we will be connecting to the instance using the Cygwin (SSH client) which we configured in the previous step.
• Copy the key pair and paste it in C:\Cygwin\home\username
• Open the Cygwin, change the permissions as per instructions.

chmod 400 filename.pem

• Use the given command or below sample command to connect the instance.

ssh -i “filename.pem” username@Public-DNS-name

• You should be access the instance command shell, and validate the configuration by the below sample commands.

hostname -f : To check the hostname of the machione
df -h: To check the storage details
Cat /etc/redhat-release : To check the OS information