Long Weekend Activity #3: Moving to the Cloud above Amazon

One day before the end of my long weekend, I decided to learn setting up Windows Server 2012 instance on Amazon EC2. Also, I noted down the setup steps for my future reference.

After signing up at Amazon Web Service website, I visited the EC2 Dashboard from the AWS Management Console. Since I’d like to setup one instance in Singapore, I had to choose the region from the drop-down list at the top-right corner of the website.

After the region was chosen, I clicked on the blue “Launch Instance” button located at the middle of the web page to launch my first virtual server on EC2. Normally I chose the Classic Wizard so that some configurations could be changed before the setup.

The following step would be choosing an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Somehow the Root Device Size was 0 GB which I had no idea why so. Due to the fact that I only wanted to try out AWS, I chose the one with Free Usage Tier, i.e. the Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Base.

In the following steps, there were options for me to set the number of instances required, instance type (set to Micro to enjoy free usage tier), subnet, network interfaces, etc. After all these, there would be a section to set the root volume size. By default, it’s 0 GB. So the instance wouldn’t be launched if the value was left default. I set it to 35 GB.

Set the volume size of the root to be 35GB.

After providing the instance details, the next step would be creating key pair which would be used to decrypt the RDP password in the later stage. Thus, the key pair needed to be downloaded and stored safely on the computer.

There was also another section to set which ports would be open/blocked on the instance.

Set up security group to determine whether a network port is open or blocked on the instance.

Finally, after reviewing all the details, I just clicked on the “Launch” button to launch the instance.

Review the information provided earlier before the launch of the instance.

Right after the button was clicked, there was a new record added to the Instances table and its State immediately changed to “running”.

By right-clicking on the instance and choosing the item “Get Windows Password”, I received the default Windows Administrator password which would be used to access the instance remotely via RDP.