How To Set Up a Cloud Webserver on Amazon Web Services - Using the Server, Conclusion

Using the Server

Whether I use Connect Method 1 or Connect Method 2, I can log into my own real computer running in the cloud and have complete root level control over the machine!  The machine is a full working (virtual) server with a CPU, Hard Drive, Memory, and a Network Interface.

Using some basic Linux commands, I was able to determine my cloud computer is running on an Intel Zeon 2.66GHz CPU with 1.7GB or RAM and 10GB or hard drive space, shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8: cpuinfo command result for the cloud server

In addition to the above hardware specs, my machine has full network access.  From the command line of my cloud computer, I can ping other devices and network addresses, verifying I have Internet access.  The IP on my cloud computer is 10.202.254.48 /23, which is a private IP address.  For an additional fee, though, I can assign a public IP address to my cloud computer.

One of the main functions of a LAMP server is to host web pages.  The AWS LAMP cloud computer is pre-configured with Apache, MySQL, and Perl running.  I don't claim to be an expert on Apache, MySQL, and Perl, but a simple test is to browse to my cloud computer's DNS and see if I get a web page. 

Indeed, browsing to http:// ec2-184-72-207-244.compute-1.amazonaws.com gave me the web page shown in Figure 9, which displayed the various status and version information about the software and configurations running on my cloud computer.

Figure 9: default AWS cloud server web page

If I were a web designer, I would now be able to start customizing my cloud web server.  I could add or modify web pages as desired.  Using scp  (secure copy protocol), I could upload web pages to run on my cloud computer.

Conclusion

There you have it, I set up a cloud computer on Amazon's network.  I used the basic options, which are best for development and test purposes.  As such, I only scratched the surface of the products available on AWS, which include Computing Services (EC2), Content Delivery, Databases, E-Commerce (FWS), Messaging (SQS), Monitoring, Private Cloud, Payment Services (FPS), Storage (S3), Support, Web Servers, and Workforce solutions.

All told, running this machine for a little less than 24 hours cost $1.49.  Note, however, that I used very little bandwidth, which is charged on an as-used basis. Since I didn't need to continue to run the machine, I selected terminate from the AWS console.  This deleted my cloud computer to stop all future charges.  Since I'm not really using the machine, I had no need to keep it running.

Had I done any work or configuration on my cloud computer, I could have copied and saved my configurations for future use.  When the time comes for future use, I simply need to fire up another instance and reload my configurations.

My goal was to document the steps to get started with cloud computing.  I have to admit, I was a bit intimidated by the whole concept of cloud computing.  In the end, though, it really was quite simple.