Getting Started with Amazon AWS

Signing Up

  1. Go to http://aws.amazon.com/, and click on “Get started for free.”
  2. Register. Fill out all information fields. You must provide your credit card. We don’t expect you to spend any money on AWS for this course—thanks to Amazon’s generous support, you each have $100 of AWS credit, which should be plenty for coursework. However, if you overspend this limit you will be responsible for the charges incurred.
  3. Verify your registration by phone. AWS will call you. When they do, enter the pin shown on the screen.
  4. Once you’ve registered an account, log into Amazon AWS Console and then go to Credits (under Billing). Enter your credit code you received via email. You should have $100 on your balance.

Getting Ready

  1. Set availability zone: Inside the Amazon AWS Console, make sure you that you set your availability zone (which corresponds to the Amazon datacenter where your VM will be hosted) to “US East (N. Virginia).” You should find this choice in the upper-right corner of the webpage in a pull-down menu (next to “Support”).
  2. Getting access key id and secrete access key: Go to Amazon AWS Security Credentials. Click on “Access Keys”, and then click on “Create New Access Key”. Record both your access key id and secrete access key; you will need them to configure Vagrant—see Creating and Running VM for details. (There is no way to retrieve an old secrete access key, but you can create a new key to use.)
  3. Creating a key pair: Go the Amazon EC2 Dashboard. In the vertical menu bar on the left, choose “Key Pairs” under “NETWORK AND SECURITY”. Click on “Create Key Pair”, and name your new key pair datacourse. You will be prompted to download a file named datacourse.pem. Save this file in a convenient place—if you use Vagrant you will want to place it in the same directory as the Vagrantfile for AWS; see Creating and Running VM for details.

Useful Tasks

  • Finding your VM’s public IP address: Go to Amazon EC2 Dashboard. In the vertical menu bar on the left, choose “Instances” under “INSTANCES”. Select your VM, and in the lower panel you will see the detailed information about this instance. One of them is “Public IP”.
  • Editing your VM’s security settings: Go to Amazon EC2 Dashboard. In the vertical menu bar on the left, choose “Instances” under “INSTANCES”. Select your VM, and in the lower panel you will see the detailed information about this instance. Find the field named “Security groups”, and click on the name of the group (which comes before “view rules”). You will then be looking at your VM’s security settings. Right click on the row to reveal a pop-up menu. You can select “Edit inbound rules” to see and change how your VM is visible to your host and to the rest of world.
    • The most important thing is to add a rule that enables SSH access. Click on “Add Rule,” choose “SSH” for “Type,” and “Anywhere” for “Source.” Then click “Save.”
    • If you are still experiencing connection problems, check if there are any existing rules that may block a remote SSH connection. Remove them and try connecting again.