You are now in the Amazon EC2 Launch Instance Wizard, which will help you configure and launch your instance.
a. With Amazon EC2, you can specify the software and specifications of the instance you want to use. In this screen, you are shown options to choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which is a template that contains the software configuration (e.g. an operating system, an application server, and applications). From an AMI, you launch an instance, which is a copy of the AMI running as a virtual server in the cloud.
For this tutorial, find Amazon Linux AMI and click Select.
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b. You will now choose an instance type. Instance types comprise of varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity so you can choose the appropriate mix for your applications. For more information, see Amazon EC2 Instance Types.
The default option of t2.micro should already be checked. This instance offers enough compute capacity to tackle simple workloads. Click Review and Launch at the bottom of the page.
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c. You can review the configuration, storage. tagging and security settings that have been selected for your instance. While you have the option to customize these settings, we recommend accepting the default values for this tutorial.
Click Launch at the bottom of the page.
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d. On the next screen you will be asked to choose an existing key pair or create a new key pair. A key pair is use to log into your instance (just like your house key is used to enter your home). Select Create a new key pair and give it the name MyFirstKey. Next click the Download Key Pair button. Be sure to save the key pair in a safe location on your computer.
Windows users: We recommend saving your key pair in your user directory in a sub-directory called .ssh (ex. C:\user\{yourusername}\.ssh\MyFirstKey.pem).
Mac/Linux users: We recommend saving your key pair in the .ssh sub-directory from your home directory (ex. ~/.ssh/MyFirstKey.pem).
Note: If you don't remember where you store your SSH private key (the file you are downloading), you won't be able to connect to your virtual machine.
After you have stored your key pair, click Launch Instance to start your Linux instance.
Note: It will take a few minutes to launch your instance.
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e. Click View Instances on the next screen to view your instances and see the status of the instance you have just started.
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f. Make note of the Public IP address of your Amazon Web Services instance, you will need this to connect to the instance in Step 2 part c.
Note: If your instance is still starting up, the Public IP address may not be shown yet. The Instance State column will show you if the instance is running yet, and the Status Checks column will tell you if the instance has passed the 2 checks to make sure it is done provisioning. You can refresh these values by pressing the refresh button on the right just above the table.
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