Let’s get started into what I was getting to talk about, in the previous post, which was hosting this Ghost blog in AWS…
I suppose you all know about how to create an AWS account, there’s absolutely no need write a tutorial about that. Lets get into setting up an EC2 instance where this little website resides in…
- Step 1: Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI):
I used Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, SUSE, Fedora, even Amazon Linux. Don’t know why I just love Ubuntu. That’s why I selected Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS (HVM) and I selected Arm because it is faster than x86 and more efficient because it is RISC CPU; whereas x86 is CISC, a dated design from Intel.
- Step 2: Choose an Instance Type:
I choose c6g.medium from ‘c6g’ family, which has 1 vCPU and 2 GB of memory (RAM). It’s a blog after all and no one should need more than those specs…
- Step 3: Configure Instance Details:
I only modified one thing from that long list of details:
Monitoring: Enable CloudWatch detailed monitoring…
- Step 4: Add Storage:
I went with gp3, a new type of SSD EBS volume. I have never seen it before and I have been using AWS since 2011 and gp2 was not even available back then. Ahh, well, it was released only a couple of weeks ago. Okay, now lets get to what it really is and does.
gp3 lets you provision performance independent storage capacity and offers a 20% lower price than the existing gp2 volume types. It is designed to provide predictable 3,000 IOPS baseline performance and 125 MB/s regardless of volume size. But it can be scaled up to 16,000 IOPS and 1,000 MB/s. The top performance of gp3 is 4x faster than the max throughput of gp2 volumes.
So, it seems that my blog has the best type of SSD that AWS provides. Awesome…
- Step 5: Add Tags:
I just added a pretty simple tag there:
Key: Site, Value: syedshariefi.com
- Step 6: Configure Security Group:
I just allowed SSH (selected ‘My IP’, which isn’t shown in the image below, for security purposes, obviously), HTTP and HTTPS rules…
- Step 7: Review:
This section just lists everything I did before. I just pressed the ‘Launch’ button, in the bottom right corner and voila! the instance got created within a couple of minutes…
Now, how do we SSH into our newly created instance?
Well, what I did was that I stored my security key in a folder where I keep all my files regarding this website. I just drag the security key in my terminal, everytime I need to SSH into the instance.
For the very first time you need to change the access permissions of the security key by chmod’ing it:
chmod 400 your-key.pemThen you just login mentioning the security key, the username and the Public IPv4 DNS address of your instance:
ssh -i "your-key.pem" [email protected]We’re in now. Let’s get to the complicated part in the next post…