Beginner's Guidance for AWS CE2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud)

Xijun Wang

01/13/2023

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services, that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. Great free resources and cloud services. Sign up here.

  1. Set up to use AWS EC2 following the official tutorial.


2. Connect to your instance using Xshell

  1. Open the AWE EC2 consol at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2

  2. In the Launch instance box, click the "Launch instance" if no instance is running, otherwise, click the "Instances (running)" under "Resources".

  3. Change Security group settings by clicking the security group ID, and then "Edit inbound rules". This step is important if you want to SSH to EC2 using port 22.

4. Add rule, and then select "SSH" with "Anywhere - IPv4".

5. Import the secret key file ".pem" into Xshell. This file should be generated when setting up your instance in step 1. Open Xshell, tools - User Key Manager - Import, and select the ".pem" file.

6. Follow the steps below to build your connection, where the Host ip is taken from the "Public IPv4 address" as shown below, and the default "User Name" is:

  • For Amazon Linux 2 or the Amazon Linux AMI, the user name is ec2-user.

  • For a CentOS AMI, the user name is centos or ec2-user.

  • For a Debian AMI, the user name is admin.

  • For a Fedora AMI, the user name is fedora or ec2-user.

  • For a RHEL AMI, the user name is ec2-user or root.

  • For a SUSE AMI, the user name is ec2-user or root.

  • For an Ubuntu AMI, the user name is ubuntu.

  • For an Oracle AMI, the user name is ec2-user.

  • For a Bitnami AMI, the user name is bitnami.

  • Otherwise, check with the AMI provider.

7. Connect to EC2, and use cat /proc/cpuinfo and du- H to check the CPU and storage information.