3 Using virtual machines: EC2

This chapter covers

Launching a virtual machine with Linux
Controlling a virtual machine remotely via the Session Manager
Monitoring and debugging a virtual machine
Saving costs for virtual machines

It’s impressive what you can achieve with the computing power of the smartphone in your pocket or the laptop in your bag. But if your task requires massive computing power or high network traffic, or needs to run reliably 24/7, a virtual machine is a better fit. With a virtual machine, you get access to a slice of a physical machine located in a data center. On AWS, virtual machines are offered by the service called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Not all examples are covered by Free Tier

The examples in this chapter are not all covered by the Free Tier. A special warning message appears when an example incurs costs. As for the other examples, as long as you don’t run them longer than a few days, you won’t pay anything for them. Keep in mind that this applies only if you created a fresh AWS account for this book and nothing else is going on in your AWS account. Try to complete the chapter within a few days; you’ll clean up your account at the end.

3.1 Exploring a virtual machine

3.1.1 Launching a virtual machine

3.1.2 Connecting to your virtual machine

3.1.3 Installing and running software manually

3.2 Monitoring and debugging a virtual machine

3.2.1 Showing logs from a virtual machine

3.2.2 Monitoring the load of a virtual machine

3.3 Shutting down a virtual machine

3.4 Changing the size of a virtual machine

3.5 Starting a virtual machine in another data center

3.6 Allocating a public IP address

3.7 Adding an additional network interface to a virtual machine

Summary