Launch an Amazon EC2 instance

For this tutorial, you launch an Amazon EC2 instance into your default VPC.

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

2. Choose Launch Instance, and do the following:

   1. On the Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) page, at the top of the list of AMIs, go to Amazon Linux AMI and choose Select.

   2. On the Choose an Instance Type page, at the top of the list of instance types, choose t2.micro. Then choose Next: Configure Instance Details.

   3. On the Configure Instance Details page, for Network, choose your default VPC. Then choose Next: Add Storage.

   4. On the Add Storage page, skip this step by choosing Next: Add Tags.

   5. On the Add Tags page, skip this step by choosing Next: Configure Security Group.

   6. On the Configure Security Group page, do the following:

      1. Choose Select an existing security group.

      2. In the list of security groups, choose default. Doing this chooses the default security group for your VPC. By default, the security group accepts inbound Secure Shell (SSH) connections on TPC port 22. If this isn’t the case for your VPC, add this rule; for more information, see What is Amazon VPC? in the Amazon VPC User Guide.

      3. Choose Next: Review and Launch.

   7. Review the information, and choose Launch.

3. In the Select an existing key pair or create a new key pair window, do one of the following:

   • If you don’t have an Amazon EC2 key pair, choose Create a new key pair and follow the instructions. You are asked to download a private key file (.pem file). You need this file later when you log in to your Amazon EC2 instance.

   • If you already have an Amazon EC2 key pair, for Select a key pair choose your key pair from the list. You must already have the private key file (.pem file) available in order to log in to your Amazon EC2 instance.

4. After you configure your key pair, choose Launch Instances.

   In the console navigation pane, choose EC2 Dashboard, and then choose the instance that you launched. In the lower pane, on the Description tab, find the Public DNS location for your instance, for example: ec2-11-22-33-44.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com.

   It takes a few minutes for your Amazon EC2 instance to become available.

5. Use the ssh command to log in to your Amazon EC2 instance, as in the following example.

   chmod 400 my-keypair.pem
   ssh -i my-keypair.pem ec2-user@public-dns-name

   Specify your private key file (.pem file) and the public DNS name of your EC2 instance. The login ID is ec2-user. No password is required.

   For further details about connecting to your EC instance, see Connecting to your Linux instance using SSH in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances.