Introduction
Amazon web services is one of the largest cloud computing companies and it provides low cost and low latency services. One of the services is called EC2 Instance (Elastic Compute); some people call it “Virtual Machine”. The term “Elastic'' refers to correctly configuring the computer in the EC2 service, you can easily increase and decrease the amount of servers automatically based on the demand of your application. At another point is you are configuring 1000 instances for your application, if any problems occur in one or more instances, it's automatically replaced by AWS.
In an AWS EC2 (Elastic compute) instance, you can make application servers, web servers, database servers, game servers, mail servers, media servers, file servers etc. All of these types of servers are easily made by EC2.
By reading this article you will learn how to create a windows server instance in AWS EC2 Compute.
Prerequisites
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AWS Console account
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RDP software
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Updated browser (Edge, chrome, firefox, safari)
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Stable internet connection
Creating EC2 Windows Instance in AWS Console
Step 1
Step 2
After successful login, now you are in the dashboard page. Click “Services” at the top of navigation bar and then click “EC2” under the “Compute” category.
Step 3
Now the EC2 instance dashboard page will be loaded. Before creating an instance we are selecting the data center region for creating the EC2 instance.
“Ohio” is the default region of AWS, I am changing the data center region to “Mumbai”. This region chooser is placed at the top right corner of the page. Click the drop down and select your region.
Step 4
After selecting the region, just scroll down. In the “Launch Instance” area, Check our region below the “Launch Instance” button. Click the “Launch Instance” button.
Step 5
After clicking the button, a drop down list will be displayed. From the list click the “Launch” instance option.
Step 6
Next, it goes to the AMI (Amazon Machine Image) page. In this page you can select your operating system for your EC2 instance. On the page search “windows” in the search option. Lists of operating system images will be displayed. Click the “Select” button to select the windows operating system.
Step 7
Next it goes to the instance type page. In this page you can choose the size of your instance like RAM, Vcpus, network performance etc. Default micro instances are chosen by AWS. You cannot make any changes in this page. Click the “Next:Configure Instance Details” button.
Step 8
In the configure instance details page, enter the number of instances on this page. Default instance value is 1. Based on your need you can create more than 800 instances.
Now we require 1 instance for small works. Click the “Next: Add Storage” button.
Step 9
On the add storage page, you need to add a storage device for storing files like a hard disk for your computer. Free tier allows 30 GB for one instance. If you need more than 30 GB you need to pay for the storage. Click the “Add New Volume” button to add a new disk for your computer.
Step 10
After clicking the button, The “EBS” [Elastic Block Storage] can be created. Give name and Size of the disk. Then click the “Next: Add Tags” button.
Step 11
In the “Add Tags” page, click the “Add to add a name tag”.
Step 12
In the key field, the key value is filled automatically as Name. Then enter the value “EC2”.
Click the “Next: Configure Security Group” button.
Step 13
In the “Configure Security Group” page, you can choose the configuration to access these EC2 compute instances. By default you choose the windows image and its automatically defined RDP connection. You cannot make any changes in this page. Click the “Review and Launch” button.
Step 14
In the review page, check all of your selected configurations and if all of these configurations are reviewed finally click the “Launch” button.
Step 15
After clicking the launch button, “Key pair” window can be prompted. On this window choose the “Create a new key pair” option from dropdown and in the next text field you can give your unique key pair name. If you fill the two fields click the “Download Key Pair” button. Save the keypair file in your computer. It's required for generating unique passwords for EC2 instances.
Step 16
Click the “Launch Instance” button in the prompt window. It's redirected to the launch status page.
Step 17
In the launch status page, a unique name for our EC2 instance can be generated. Click the unique name it takes to the EC2 instance dashboard.
Step 18
Your EC2 instance can be created and run successfully :). Let's get started to connect our EC2 instance with our local computer.
Connecting EC2 Windows Instance With Local Computer
Step 1
Select your created instance and then click the “Connect” button.
Step 2
Click the “Download Remote Desktop File” button to download the RDP file and keep it safe on your computer.
Step 3
Click the “Get Password” button.
Step 4
The new path selection button can be displayed. Choose the download keypair file to upload and then click the “Decrypt Password” button.
Step 5
Our unique password for our created windows EC2 instance. Copy the password and paste in any word processor file.
Step 6
Goto our downloaded RDP file path and run the downloaded RDP file.
Step 7
The RDP software prompt to connect with EC2 instance, click the “Connect” button.
Step 8
After clicking the connect button, Windows login window can be opened. On this password field paste the copied password from the AWS console and then click the “Ok” button. It starts to establish connections with AWS EC2 instances.
Summary
Our created AWS EC2 windows instances are successfully connected with our local computer through remote desktop connection.