Getting ready

Before going ahead and launching an EC2 Instance, we will require resources we created in preceding tasks; that is, security groups and VPC (subnets).

Creating an EC2 instance requires the following basic parameters:

• Instance type, which determines hardware of the host computer used for our instance. An instance type offers a wide range of compute, memory, network, and storage capacity.
• Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which contains information to launch the instance. It consists of a template for root volume; that is, an operating system and applications. We will learn more about AMI in upcoming tasks.
• EC2 keypair which is a set of RSA public-private keys. It is used to log in as the default user of the instance.