In order for an instance to have internet access, you will need the following: An internet gateway attached to your vpc The internet gateways is associate by an entry in your route table. Note, your VPC can have multiple route tables. This route table must be attached to your subnet, […]

Here are the steps: Create a vpc (which also creates a new route table behind the scenes) Create 2 subnets inside this vpc. These subnets also needs to be in the same availability zone as the web-server instance, which by default both subnets ends up inheriting the vpc’s route table. […]

Key points the name of a placement group has to be unique within your aws account. only certain instance types can be attached to placement groups, c, g, m, i you can’t move existing instances into a placement group.   A placement group  is a cluster of instances that are […]

You can control data traffic flowing to/from your resources via security groups. Or at the higher subnet level, via Network ACLs. Security Groups When you create a new instance, then by default all data traffic that are attempting to reach the EC2 instance (across all ports) are denied. I think […]

Status checks Cloudwatch is a monitoring service.  It can monitor for 2 types of checks: System Status Checks Instance Status Checks System Status Checks These are checks that gives information about whether aws underlying hardware/software has developed a fault. If any of these checks fails then it is something AWS […]

A public IP address is not a static IP address, i.e. it will change if you reboot your EC2 instance   Elastic IP Addresses on the other hand is persistant. you can assign to one instance, or at a later date reassign it to a different instance. Inside a vpc […]

EBS is the way to add additional block device storage to your ec2 instance. Once attached it is still up to you to do all the tasks you need to mount it, e.g. use fdisk, mkfs.ext4, add entry to /etc/fstab…etc. Note, you can only attach EBS devices to the an […]

When you create a new EC2 instance, there is a chance you want to run a series of shell scripts to further prepare the instance before it is ready for use. This is possible using a tool called cloud-init. You have to pass in “user-data” into cloud-init. As a sidenote, […]

In the EC2 section of your AWS web console, there is a section called “limits”. This sets arbitariry limits on things like how many running EC2 instance you are allowed to have at any given time. This limits are in place mainly for AWS own benefit to help them plan […]

Once you have logged into the dashboard, you can create new AWS login accounts by clicking on the “Identity and Access Management” link. When creating a new user, you will get prompted on whether you want to have an “API access key”, if you did then you will get the […]