aj-geddes/aws-ec2-setup

AWS EC2 Setup

Table of Contents

• Overview
• When to Use
• Quick Start
• Reference Guides
• Best Practices

Overview

Amazon EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Launch and configure virtual servers with complete control over networking, storage, and security settings. Scale automatically based on demand.

When to Use

• Web application servers
• Application backends and APIs
• Batch processing and compute jobs
• Development and testing environments
• Containerized applications (ECS)
• Kubernetes clusters (EKS)
• Database servers
• VPN and proxy servers

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

# Create security group
aws ec2 create-security-group \
  --group-name web-server-sg \
  --description "Web server security group" \
  --vpc-id vpc-12345678

# Add ingress rules
aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress \
  --group-id sg-0123456789abcdef0 \
  --protocol tcp \
  --port 80 \
  --cidr 0.0.0.0/0

aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress \
  --group-id sg-0123456789abcdef0 \
  --protocol tcp \
  --port 443 \
  --cidr 0.0.0.0/0

aws ec2 authorize-security-group-ingress \
  --group-id sg-0123456789abcdef0 \
  --protocol tcp \
  --port 22 \
  --cidr YOUR_IP/32

// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

| Guide | Contents | |---|---| | EC2 Instance Creation with AWS CLI | EC2 Instance Creation with AWS CLI | | User Data Script | User Data Script | | Terraform EC2 Configuration | Terraform EC2 Configuration |

Best Practices

✅ DO

• Use security groups for network control
• Attach IAM roles for AWS access
• Enable CloudWatch monitoring
• Use AMI for consistent deployments
• Implement auto-scaling for variable load
• Use EBS for persistent storage
• Enable termination protection for production
• Keep systems patched and updated

❌ DON'T

• Use overly permissive security groups
• Store credentials in user data
• Ignore CloudWatch metrics
• Use outdated AMIs
• Create hardcoded configurations
• Forget to monitor costs