I have a developer who I am working with to launch a new flash games portal. This portal required running an import and translation process for over 50000 games from a variety of publishers using php and curl.

He needed larger than normal CPU and RAM for his script to run and bring in the games and translate all their meta data.

Amazon’s EC2 is a great platform for such an on-demand computing task. I was able to bring up an instance (m1.large – 7.5 GB memory 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each) 850 GB instance storage (2×420 GB plus 10 GB root partition) 64-bit platform I/O Performance: High) and hand it over to him to run the importer and the translation job for 5 hours each weekend evening with extreme ease and I would love to share this with all of you.

You do need an aws account. Once you get that set up, you logon to your AWS Management Console. It looks like this:

Amazon AWS Management Console

From here you need to do this:

Click Launch Instance button on the page.

On Step 1, click on Community AMI’s and enter one of the Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) listed with Ubuntu’s EC2 page according to your needs.

Ubuntu 64-bit 9.10 Karmic Koala EC2 AMI

I searched for the ami-55739e3c for my instance. Then click on Select.

This will bring you to the instance details page. Here you can choose the size of the instance which will impact the price you pay for this instance. This screen also gives you the option to buy a spot instances.

Accept the defaults on the Advanced Instance options screen unless you are an advanced user. I accepted the defaults and unless you are an advanced user I highly recommend doing the same.

Ubuntu EC2 Instance Details Screen

Create the keypair. This is a very important screen. Please create and download this keypair in the folder where you will fire your command prompt for or use putty to point to.

EC2-KeyPair

Accept the firewall defaults for the Default security group.

Firewall Default

Review all your settings one last time before you launch your instance.

EC2 Instance Final Review before launch

Click on Launch and the instance will get rolling. It will take a minute or so for the instance to be set up. Don’t worry you are only charged from the moment the instance is completely booted up.

Navigate to the instances link of the AWS Management Console and you will see your instance listed. Once it is completely up and running you will see the public DNS entry such as ec2-185-77-129-63.compute-1.amazonaws.com. The numeric part of the DNS is your public IP. Hence in the above case it is 185.77.129.63. Note this down. You will need this to access it.

Now fire up your command line and start this:

Harry-MacBook-/User/Harry/ec2 $ ssh -i id_rsa-mykeypairforubuntu ubuntu@ec2-185-77-129-63.compute-1.amazonaws.com
The authenticity of host 'ec2-185-77-129-63.compute-1.amazonaws.com (185.77.129.63)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is a4:a2:4c:39:63:d9:a9:34:de:66:8f:f6:11:75:2c:9e.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'ec2-185-77-129-63.compute-1.amazonaws.com,185-77-129-63' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
Linux ip-10-19-153-39 2.6.31-302-ec2 #7-Ubuntu SMP Tue Oct 13 19:55:22 UTC 2009 x86_64


Voila. Congratulation you are now logged in to your server.

The above should take you 3-4 minutes.

Now the steps to give your developer Dan full access to this instance. On the command line execute the code below to add Dan.

sudo useradd -d /home/dan -m dan – This will create the user and his home directory.
sudo passwd dan – This will set a password for him.

If Dan needs full access to the box for installing various software for his code, here is how you give him sudo access to it.

sudo visudo

Go to the line that says #User privilege specificationroot ALL=(ALL) ALL.
And Add dan ALL=(ALL) ALL

Then Control X. Type Y and hit enter.

Next give your developer Dan ssh access. Here is how to do it:

sudo cp /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.original
sudo chmod a-w /etc/ssh/sshd_config.original
sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Make sure that you change PasswordAuthentication no to:
PasswordAuthentication yes
sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart
And Dan can now get in from his remote host using the user name and password you created.

In case you still have trouble, go back to your AWS Management console, click on Security Groups and make sure you have an entry like this:

SSH tcp 22 22 0.0.0.0/0

Let me know how you liked the post or if you have a quicker better idea to accomplish the above steps.