This tutorial guides you how to setup an Amazon EC2 cloud computing account. You may note that in this tutorial we will only be creating an account and set that up for doing the cloud computing tasks. The steps after this stage (like launching an instance, accessing the cloud from your system using command line etc will be covered in the next tutorial).

Introduction

In cloud computing you don’t need to have your own hardware (except for accessing the cloud) to do the computational tasks. It will be available in the cloud and you can pay as you use the service.

This makes it scalable and robust. Essentially, you will be pulling resources from so many computers in the ‘cloud’ for performing a particular computational task. Hence if you are running an application that requires so much of hardware resources then cloud computing is the right choice.

Amazon

Amazon is a leading service provider in this realm. They actually extended a part of their own network (which supports the amazon.com website) for providing services to third parties. All their services are PAYG (pay as you go) and you will be charged only when you are actually using the service.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers various services as described below:

• Amazon EC2  – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
• Amazon S3  – Amazon Simple Storage Service
• Amazon CloudFront (it is essentially an S3 to distribute the data)
• Amazon CloudWatch (as the name suggests, it is a monitoring service)
• Amazon SimpleDB  (for handling data sets)

In this tutorial we will stick ourself to the first two services provided by Amazon – EC2 (cloud) and S3 (data storage).

Sign Up

Inorder to start using the service you need to go to the following site and register

http://aws.amazon.com/

You can use the same account (Amazon account) that you use to buy books from Amazon.

Once you have done that you see message like this:

Now go to this page and signup for the EC2 service. You may note that you need to signin again during this stage.

If you are using Amazon services already it will not ask you for a credit card. But if you want to use a new card, you can do the same by entering the details in the box provided at the end of the page:

Once you have done that you will asked to verify your identity. You can do the same by providing your phone number and clicking on the button ‘call me now’

Now you can expect a call from Amazon (my ADP1 phone showed the number as ‘unknown’!) and you can enter the PIN displayed in the web page, using the type pad.

Once you have done that correctly, you will be shown this screen:

After completing that stage, you can signup for S3 by visiting this page. Upon completion of this step (just follow the instructions shown to you) you will see a ‘success  dialogue box’

Now you can go to the AWS home page and click on ‘Account’. Once you are in page, navigate to the ‘Security Credentials’ page by selecting the item from the side bar.

There you can see your Access Key ID. In this page you will see your secret access key and account number as well. You may note that you need to treat your secret access key and key ID securely, as they can give access to your AWS account.

Now go to the X.509 certificates tab and click on the link – ‘Create a new certificate’:

This will generate a new X.509 certificate for you.

You need to download both your ‘Private key file’ and ‘X.509 certificate’ to your system. You may rename them appropriately so that you can recall them later (we need these files for accessing the cloud from your system).

At this stage, you have the following items:

• X.509 certificate file (.pem file)
• X.509 private key file (.pem file)
• AWS account ID
• Access key ID
• Secret Access KEY

You may again go to AWS home page and click on the link ‘Sign in to the AWS Management Console’ (displayed on the top of the page).

This will redirect you to the console. Once you are in the console, click on ‘Key pair’ in side bar and then click on the button ‘Create Key Pair’

This will allow you to generate a new key pair and give them a name.

The page will also ask you to download the generated key pair (another .pem file) to your computer.

Now you have completed the setup phase of AWS (Amazon).

The next tutorial will guide you how to launch an instance (see the picture given below) and access the cloud from your system.

You may also note that you will only be charged when you launch an instance. So make sure that you terminate your instances each time you initiate them.