EC2 Instances

In this section, you will spin up EC2 instances in your VPC and protect them with a security group only allowing ICMP traffic to reach the hosts.

Launch an EC2 Instance into a Public Subnet

Important

In this section, you will create an EC2 instance in the Public Subnet of AZ2 (Availability Zone B). You will create the instance in AZ1 in the next section.

1. In the Instances section of the EC2 console click Launch Instances

   

2. In the resulting Launch an instance screen

   • Enter VPC A Public AZ2 Server for the Name
   • Ensure that Amazon Linux 2023 AMI will be selected, and the instance type is t2.micro.
   • AMIs in dCloud are whitelisted, we will be using ami-07caf09b362be10b8 which is an Amazon Linux 2023 AMI in us-east-1

   

   

3. Under Key pair (login) select Proceed without a key pair. A key pair is not needed since we will be using Systems Manager to connect to the instances.

   

4. Under Network settings click Edit and

   • Select VPC A from the dropdown for the VPC field
   • Select VPC A Public subnet AZ2 from the dropdown for the Subnet field
   • Select Enable for the Auto-assign Public IP field

   

5. Select Create security group with the name VPC A Security Group, description of Open-up ports for ICMP

6. In Inbound security groups rules under Type select All ICMP - IPv4 and enter 0.0.0.0/0 as the Source

   

   Since security groups are stateful, you don’t need to edit the outbound rules. The security group will allow the instance to respond to the ping since it saw the ping arrive at the instance.

7. Expand Advanced network configuration and under Primary IP enter 10.0.2.100.

   

8. At the bottom of the section

   • Expand Advanced details
   • Under IAM Instance profile select US-instance-profile which was created in the pre-requisites section.
   • Click Launch instance

   

9. Click View all instances

   

   Important

   If you just finished the last step, your EC2 instance might still be spinning up. You can tell by looking at the Instance State and Status Checks columns. If you see Pending state or status Initializing, the instance is not ready yet. After few minutes, you should have an EC2 instance in the "running" state.

   Congratulations! You have just launched a virtual server in your public subnet in AZ2.

   Launch Instance in Private Subnet

   You could follow the same process in the last two sections in order to deploy an EC2 instance into a private subnet, however it is also possible to launch a new instance using the same settings as previously.

10. In the Instances section of the EC2 console

    • Select the running public instance VPC A Public AZ2 Server
    • Click Actions then Image and templates then Launch more like this

    

11. In the settings screen

    • Update the Name to VPC A Private AZ1 Server
    • Under Key pair (login) select Proceed without a key pair.
    • Update the Subnet to be VPC A Private Subnet AZ1
    • Set the Auto-Assign Public IP setting to Disable.
    • Expand Advanced network configuration and under Primary IP enter 10.0.1.100.
    • Click Launch instance

    

12. Click View all instances. There should now be two EC2 instances running in the VPC

    

    Congratulations, you now have an EC2 instance running in both a public and private subnet.