A Beginner's Guide to running a JumpBox on Amazon's EC2 service

Fifteen minutes from now you could be running any of the JumpBoxes that are now available as public beta AMI's on Amazon's EC2 service. As the least technical person in our office, I've known what EC2 is in the abstract sense for awhile now. Let me say it was extremely satisfying to finally fire up a JumpBox on EC2 and see how that service works first hand. I took screenshots of the entire process start to finish (which took just under 15min) in order to share here for anyone else who might be as daunted by EC2 as I was.

It should be noted that EC2 as a web hosting mechanism has some flaws (no persistent disk storage so if you're node dies you can lose data not to mention your app can come back up under another IP address and disappear from its domain- this is not a hosting substitute for critical apps at this point). But this is a very slick way to get a public instance of a JumpBox running quickly for a non-critical application. It's perfect for a scenario where you need to evaluate an application with a distributed team or proof a job for a remote client.

Here are the steps that I took to get the MarKamp.org wiki working yesterday:

• First you'll need to setup an account on Amazon Webservices if you don't already have one. Go to aws.amazon.com, complete their application process and specify your payment details.
  

 

• Next you have to enable the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and S3 (Simple Storage) services for your account.
  

 

• Now you need to find out what your AWS credentials are.
  

 

• Copy your Access Key ID and your Secret Access Key to some place where you can get them later.
  

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Courtesy : http://www.jumpbox.com