Having long ignored trying out AWS I have finally taken the plunge and activated an account. As a basic use case, I want to investigate how I can build a standard web site to support a WordPress blog. My plan would be to use an EC2 Ubuntu Linux instance to build a standard LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server which I could install WordPress on. There is a standard tutorial on Amazon to walk you through the process of doing exactly this, since it is a very standard setup. Not only should this save me a lot of time blundering through the setup, along the way I hope to gain more insight into how AWS works.
As a first step I walked through the basic setup steps documented in “Setting Up with Amazon EC2” with the following customization:
- I configured two IAM Groups, one for Administrators and one for Operators to better understand the RBAC concept. Of course I also needed to setup two users, one as admin and one as operator.
- I configured a custom VPC with a public subnet. This is part of the tutorial but may not be necessary.
I added a standard security group as described in the tutorial as shown below.
Once this was done, I moved onto the guide, “Getting Started with Amazon EC2 Linux Instances.” I selected a Ubuntu t2.micro instance and configured it with my new VPC and Security Group. I used the key I generated in the tutorial as described and then launched the instance. It took less than a minute to show it was running.
Once it was up, I proceeded to connect via putty to the instance using the configuration below.
Which worked without any problems…
Since I logged in with the user Ubuntu using the ssh key for my user, the next step is to setup a local user with a real user name using a privately generated key pair unknown to Amazon and disable the ubuntu generic user.