How to start in Amazon ECS

To get started, you can use a free tier account, that is free for one year with some minor restrictions ( use the server only upto 750 Hours a month, when you cross this theshold they will charge you) . You can check all the rules related this on aws portal.

To create a server, first you have to get an Amazon AWS account.

AWS provides a special account called "Free tier" where you can use the AWS technology

You can get a freit in this link. You will need to give your credit card details for it.

Sometimes is hard to understand the words in AWS so lets say that:

1. EC2 (Einstein reference?) (Elastic compute cloud): This refers to a virtual machine.
2. AMI (Amazon machine image): This is the OS instance.
3. EBS (Elastic block storage): one of the type Storage environment in AWS.

Enter AWS

https://console.aws.amazon.com/



Create the instance

1. In the AWS console go to EC2



2. Now click on "Launch Instance" Button under Create instance. 





3. Now, you have to choose what kind of server you are getting. Consider that if you don´t want to pay you have to select the Free Tier radio button so that AWS will only show the instances which are used for free usage.

If you want a Linux instance you can choose Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS (HVM), SSD Volume Type. click Select. 64-bit (x86) is ok.





Choose the instance type. Here we will use a free tier t2.micro.





Then it will say Configure Instance Details: Do not change anything simply click next.

In Add Storage: 

You can go to edit storage and set storage as 30GB which is the maximum for free tier.

Do not change anything simply click next as we will using default Size 10 (GiB) Hard disk in this case.

Add Tags: Do not change anything simply click next.

Configure Security Group: Now select port 22 which is used for ssh so that you can access this server from anywhere.

Select review and launch buttonIf all the details are Ok now press the "Launch" button,

Once you clicked the Launch button, a popup window gets displayed to create a "Key pair" as shown below: Select the option "create a new key pair" and give a name to key pair. Then download the same. You require this key pair while connecting to the server using ssh. At the end, click the "Launch Instance" button.

After clicking Launch instance Button, go to services at the left top side. Select Compute--> EC2. Now click on running instance link as below:

Now you can see that your new VM is ready with status "running" as shown below. Select the Instance and Please note down the "Public DNS value" which is required for logging on to the server.

Now you are done with creating a sample Linux installed VM. To connect to the server, follow below steps.

Connect to an EC2 instance from Windows

1. First of all, you need to have putty gen and Putty exe's for connecting to the server from Windows (or the SSH command on Linux). You can download putty by following this Link.

2. Now open the putty gen "puttygen.exe".

3. You need to click on the "Load button", browse and select the keypair file (pem file) that you downloaded above from Amazon.

4. You need to select the "ssh2-RSA" option and click on the save private key button. Kindly select yes on the next pop-up.

5. Save the file with the file extension .ppk.

6. Now you need to open Putty.exe. Go to connection at the left side menu then select "SSH" and then select "Auth". You need to click on the browse button to select the .ppk file that we created in the step 4.

7. Now click on the "session" menu and paste the DNS value captured during the 'k' step of this tutorial in the "host name" box and hit the open button.

8. Upon asking for username and password, enter "ec2-user" and blank password and then give below command.

$sudo su -

Hurray, you are now root on the Linux server which is hosted on AWS cloud.