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Last active August 29, 2015 14:03
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primer.md

You're going to start up a Linux EC2, set up its firewall rules, and connect to it.

  • If you're not doing production work always try and use the sandbox account, so log into sandbox account.

  • The first thing you need is an AMI, which is like a snapshot that is the starting point for your machine. Go to https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/locator/ec2/ to find ubuntu AMIs. These are like from-scratch instances that are kept up-to-date with security patches. If you search for 14.04 that'll be the latest stable ubuntu release, then you're looking for one that's in the right region (generally that's us-east-1), the right architecture (usually amd64) and the right instance type (usually that's instance-store). Copy the

  • Clicking on one of the ami-12345 links will pop you over to the AWS EC2 console and start you down the road of creating the instance.

  • First you'll have to choose an instance type. You'll want the smallest (i.e. cheapest) one that has enough capacity for what you're doing. I'd go for m1.small. Click "Next: Configure instance details"

  • All these default values are fine. Click "Next: Add storage".

  • You could add more capacity to your instance here, but shouldn't need to "Next: Tag instance"

  • Give the instance a name like "atlas unboxing" or whatever. Just to indicate what it is in case you forget to shut it off when you're done and someone else wonders if it's safe to kill. "Next: Configure security group".

  • Security groups are firewall rules for your instance. Two important rules for this

    • allow TCP traffic on port 22 from anywhere (0.0.0.0/0). This will let you connect to the instance via SSH
    • allow TCP traffic on port 2999 from anywhere. This will let you connect to atlas server once its running

  • Then move on to "Review and launch". When you actually click "Launch" you'll be asked about a keypair. You should create a new keypair for yourself and download the private key. Stash it in your ~/.ssh folder -- this will be how you connect via SSH once the instance is running.

Once its going you'll be able to find its public DNS name in the EC2 console. Then you'll connect to it with

ssh -i ~/.ssh/your-private-key [email protected]
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