You have decided to move some webs to the cloud and of course you want to try Amazon AWS to obtain much flexibility and reliablity. But … Which is the first step? What services should I use?

The first step is use  AWS  Free Usage Tier because you can prove Amazon AWS without pay and you obtain a micro instance with the following features:

AWS Free Usage Tier (Per Month):

• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Linux Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of Amazon EC2 Microsoft Windows Server Micro Instance usage (613 MB of memory and 32-bit and 64-bit platform support) – enough hours to run continuously each month*
• 750 hours of an Elastic Load Balancer plus 15 GB data processing*
• 30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, plus 2 million I/Os and 1 GB of snapshot storage*
• 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*
• 100 MB of storage, 5 units of write capacity, and 10 units of read capacity for Amazon DynamoDB.**
• 25 Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hours and 1 GB of Storage**
• 1,000 Amazon SWF workflow executions can be initiated for free. A total of 10,000 activity tasks, signals, timers and markers, and 30,000 workflow-days can also be used for free**
• 100,000 Requests of Amazon Simple Queue Service**
• 100,000 Requests, 100,000 HTTP notifications and 1,000 email notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service**
• 10 Amazon Cloudwatch metrics, 10 alarms, and 1,000,000 API requests**
• 15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services*
• 750 hours of Amazon RDS for SQL Server Micro DB Instance usage (running SQL Server Express Edition in a single Availability Zone) – enough hours to run a DB Instance continuously each month
• 20 GB of database storage
• 10 million I/Os
• 20 GB of backup storage for your automated database backups and any user-initiated DB Snapshots

This type of instance is useful for microwebsite with a few simultaneous users to check how your webs and services works in the cloud.

In the following video you can see how easy is use AWS. Thanks to Greg Wilson for making it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAB8wCg9MyE]

The briefing can be this:

Once you have an AWS user you have to log in the main page:

AWS Home

First step is request an elastic ip for your public services because each time you will turn on your instance it will have a new temporal ip if you don’t have an elastic ip.

Once you already have an elastic ip you can  see it in the following page:

Elastic ip attached

Then you have to create a new ssh key pair for connect to the instance by ssh:

Key pair creation

Once you have already created it you can see the list of keys and download it:

Now you can create your first instance:

Creating an instance

First of all you have to choose the AMI you want to use. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a special type of pre-configured operating system and virtual application software which is used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It serves as the basic unit of deployment for services delivered using EC2.

Collection of generic AMIs

And a collection of community AMIs:

Collection of community AMIs

And of course you can to create your own AMIs.

Next step is to choose the number of instances, type and zone of it:

Instance details

Last optional details:

Advanced  details about the instance

Then you should to choose the key pair you want to connect at the instance:

Choosing key pair

Then you can create a security group that is a collection of firewall rules:

Security group

Finally you have a briefing of the instance that you are going to create:

Chosen configuration

And you can check how your instance are booting:

Instance correctly created

To connect  at the instance by ssh you have to attach a elastic ip to the instance:

Attaching elastic ip to instance

Instance which you want to attach the elastic ip

You have to use ec2-user with sudo rights for security reasons:

$ ssh -i systemadmin-key.pem ec2-user@1xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
__|  __|_  )  Amazon Linux AMI

_|  (     /     Beta

___|___|___|
See /etc/image-release-notes for latest release notes. 🙂

[root@xxxxx ~]#
In the instances list you can manage the basic operations like booting or shutdown instances:

Instances list

Managing instances

• Terminate: Careful! Erase the instance definitely
• Reboot
• Stop
• Start

If you want to check the log of the instance you have to choose the Get System Log option:

Instance log

You can see it is a xen log.

As soon as possible I will show you more services of AWS!