Using EC2 – Getting Started Guide example

sam — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 02:52:39 +0000

Get setup to use EC2 (detailed in a prior post).

Find the AMI you want to run: List AMIs. Find ec2-public-images/getting-started.manifest.xml and note it’s AMI number from column 2:

ec2-describe-images -o self -o amazon

...snip...
IMAGE	ami-2bb65342	ec2-public-images/getting-started.manifest.xml	amazon	available	public		i386	machine
...snip...

Create an ssh keypair that will be used to access it:

ec2-add-keypair gsg-keypair

Save key to id_rsa-gsg-keypair

Create an instance of that type that will be accessed using that keypair:

ec2-run-instances ami-2bb65342 -k gsg-keypair

RESERVATION	r-22f4254b	337706654870	default
INSTANCE	i-6b14b302	ami-2bb65342			pending	gsg-keypair	0		m1.small	2008-09-10T01:54:13+0000

Keep checking it until it’s status changes from pending to running:

ec2-describe-instances i-6b14b302

INSTANCE	i-6b14b302	ami-2bb65342	ec2-75-101-211-91.compute-1.amazonaws.com	ip-10-250-13-176.ec2.internal	running	gsg-keypair	0		m1.small	2008-09-10T01:54:13+0000	us-east-1b

Allow SSH and HTTP access to instances in your default group:

ec2-authorize default -p 22
ec2-authorize default -p 80

Login to your instance:

ssh -i Keys/aws/ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair root@root@ec2-75-101-211-91.compute-1.amazonaws.com

To tear it down:

ec2-terminate-instances i-6b14b302

The instances hang around in the output of ec2-describe-instances for quite some time, in state terminated. After I went to the store and came back, they were gone.

Setting up to use EC2

sam — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:20:29 +0000

This is a short list of the steps I took to get access to Amazon EC2. I basically followed the EC2 Getting Started Guide.

I already had an AWS account.

Subscribed to EC2: browsed to Amazon Web Services @ Amazon.com, clicked on “Sign Up For This Web Service”, completed forms.

Generated X.509 certificates: Your Web Services Account -> View Access Key Identifiers -> Your X.509 Certificate -> Create New.

Downloaded credentials: Downloaded the private key and certificate to ~/.ec2 (effectively – actually in my world this is a symlink to ~/Keys/aws/ec2/ ).

Figured out my EC2 user ID: Your Web Services Account -> Account Activity -> Account Number. Remove the hyphens to generate a 12 digit number. This is your EC2 userid. This step appears to be redundant. After setting up and tearing down an instance, I have yet to use this userid.

Downloaded the EC2 Command Line tools: from the Amazon EC2 Resource Center. Unzipped them and moved them to ~/Library/ec2-api-tools-1.3-24159 (seemed like a good place, this being Mac OS X).

Setup environment variables: Arranged for EC2_HOME environment variable to be set, and it’s bin dir to be added to my path, my JAVA_HOME to be set, and for the tools to know who I am (EC2_PRIVATE_KEY and EC2_CERT), in .bash_profile:

export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home
export EC2_HOME=~/Library/ec2-api-tools-1.3-24159
export PATH=$PATH:~/bin:/opt/local/bin:$EC2_HOME/bin
export EC2_CERT=~/Keys/aws/ec2/cert-XXXXXXXX.pem
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/Keys/aws/ec2/pk-XXXXXXXX.pem

Activate all those variables (start a new terminal window) and in it see if you are up and running by typing:

ec2-describe-images -o self -o amazon

If it produces a list of AMIs (Amazon Machine Images), you are good to go.

Sam Pierson's Blog » aws

Using EC2 – Getting Started Guide example

Setting up to use EC2