Friday, April 7, 2017

Creating a Windows EC2 and logging into it

In the previous blog, we looked at creating a Linux EC2 instance and logging into it. This time it would be a Windows EC2 instance. The steps are more or less the same with some minor changes here and there. I will highlight the changes in this blog, so I would recommend going through the blog where we created a Linux instance and come back to this blog.

1. Login to the EC2 management console. Create a Key Pair, if you haven't already done as shown here. The same Key Pair can be used for Linux and Windows instance. There is no need to create two different Key Pairs. And also, there is no need to convert the pem file into a ppk file for logging into a Windows instance.

2. Create a Security Group as shown here. Instead of opening port 22 for ssh, open port 3389 as shown below.


3. Click on `Instances` in the left pane and click on `Launch Instances`.

4. Select the Windows AMI as shown below.


5. Select the EC2 instance type as shown below.


 6. Click on `Next : Configure Instance Details`.

7. Click on `Next : Add Storage`. Note that in the case of Linux instance the storage defaults to 8GB, but in the case of Windows it's 30GB. Windows eats lot of space.

8.Click on `Next : Add Tags`.

9. Click on `Next : Configure Security Group`. Click on `Select an existing security group` and select the Security Group which has been created for the Windows instance.

10. Click on `Review and Launch`.

11. Make sure all the settings are proper and click on `Launch`.

12. Select the Key Pair which has been created earlier and click the `I acknowledge .....` check box. Finally, click on `Launch Instances`.

13. Click on `View Instances`. In a couple of minutes, the Instance State should change to running as shown below.


14. Make sure that the instance is selected and click on the `Connect Button` to download the `Remote Desktop File`. Save it somewhere, where you can find it easily.


15. Click on the `Get Password` button. Click on `Browse` and point to the pem file which was generated during the Key Pair creation. Click on `Decrypt Password`.

16. A random password is generated and displayed as shown below. Note down the password.


17. Double Click on the `Remote Desktop File` which was created in Step 14. Click on `Connect` when prompted with a warning.

18. Enter the password which we got in Step 16 and click on OK. Click on `Yes` when prompted with a warning.


19. Now, we are connected to the Windows EC2 instance in the AWS cloud.


20. Make sure to shutdown the Windows instance and terminate the EC2 instance from the AWS EC2 console to stop the billing.

Similarly, we would be able to start multiple Linux and Windows instances based on our Non Functional Requirements (NFR). Instead of creating the instances manually, Auto Scaling can be used. In Auto Scaling, we can specify conditions when the number of instances should scale up or scale down. Like, if CPU > 80% then add 2 Linux instances, if CPU < 30% then remove 2 Linux instances. Here we specify CPU, but a lot of other metrics can used.

AWS is fun, this is just the beginning and we will look into AWS in the upcoming blogs.

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