Working with Amazon Web Services (EC2)

In this demo I will install a “pre-baked” AMI with a complete WordPress setup installed. There are thousands of these AMI’s available in the AWS community. For this one launch the AWS Management Console at http://aws.amazon.com and choose the EC2 tab. In the AWS console make certain you selected the correct region and select ‘Images-AMIs’ in the left menu and search for “bitnami-wordpress”:
Screen Shot 2012-12-09 at 08.05.04
Select the AMI of your choice (I have 64-bit Ubuntu running WordPress 3.4.2.1) and click ‘Launch’. Now simply follow the steps of the wizard (although there is a lot to tell about almost every option in the wizard I simply go for the most default installation). At the Instance Details step make sure you select a Micro instance (to cut down the cost of having this demo running):
Screen Shot 2012-12-09 at 08.15.57
In the next two steps simply accept all defaults:
Screen Shot 2012-12-09 at 08.16.47
Screen Shot 2012-12-09 at 08.17.12
At the Create Key Pair step create a key pair if you haven’t already done so:Screen Shot 2012-12-09 at 08.19.19
The next step Configure Firewall create a Security Group so we are able to access our Linux instance from the outside world by HTTP and SSH:
Screen Shot 2012-12-09 at 08.21.36
Finally review all your settings and if it is okay then launch the instance:
Screen Shot 2012-12-09 at 08.22.31
After a few seconds you should be able to see your new instance in the Instances overview in the AWS Management Console:
Screen Shot 2012-12-09 at 08.29.57
Please pay specific attention to the public DNS that is assigned to the instance. As you might be aware this DNS will change after you stopped and started this instance. So I use it now to show how to connect to the instance via SSH but you should not use this DNS as if it was a fixed IP/DNS. To work around this issue Amazon supplies Elastic IP which I show in another post.
To connect with SSH to this instance open up a Terminal on your Mac and type the following commands.
First I had to narrow the permissions on the downloaded pem file for which I used:
chmod u=r,go= 4synergy_palma.pem
Then I was able to connect to the Bitnami instance via SSH with:
ssh -i 4synergy_palma.pem bitnami@ec2-54-246-78-211.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com as you can see here:
Screen Shot 2012-12-09 at 09.08.39
And of course we can enter our WordPress by opening the home URL in a web browser:
Screen Shot 2012-12-09 at 09.15.20

In the next posts I will extend this example to make it a more robust and scalable solution.

:)