- [Morgan] All right, you've learned some AWS vocabulary, some of the concepts behind cloud computing, as well as some specifics around cloud identity and access management. As a refresher, let's take a look at the architecture diagram we'll be building out. You can see here it's fairly complicated at a glance. There are many different services working together to host this solution. And to get this entire thing built out will take some time and understanding. You'll get the opportunity to build out each individual piece in your own account. What I want to do now is show you how we are going to host our employee directory application using a service called Amazon EC2, which I have mentioned briefly in previous videos. I find that the best way for me to explain to you how these services work is just to show you how they work. So what we're going to do is we're going to call Alana in to launch an Amazon EC2 instance and host the employee directory application using the defaults provided by AWS. AWS provides you with something called the default VPC which is a private network for your AWS resources. Every EC2 instance you launch using AWS must live inside of a network. So in order to complete this demo with the limited information that we've shown you about AWS services, we will be using the default network provided by AWS. And we will accept most of the default values for launching an EC2 instance. Let's call it Alana to help us out. Hey Alana, where are you at? - [Alana] Oh, hey Morgan. Is it time to launch our first EC2 instance? - [Morgan] It is. We will be using the default VPC to launch this first instance, and we will configure the bare minimum to get our application up and running. Sound good? - [Alana] Yup, I got it. Let's get started. I'm already in the AWS Management Console and I will go ahead and navigate to the service, Amazon EC2. As Morgan already mentioned, Amazon EC2 is a compute service that allows you to host virtual machines. You'll learn a lot about this topic coming up soon, but for now, we are going to simply create an EC2 instance to try to help you wrap your mind around using AWS services on demand. From here, we will go ahead and launch a new EC2 instance. And an instance is just what we call one single virtual machine. Now we have to select the configurations for this EC2 instance. You will go over these configurations in detail later. But for now, we will select the Free Tier eligible options using a Linux AMI and then also a T2 micro instance type and then click next. Then we will select the network we want the instance to be launched into. And as we discussed earlier, we'll be using the default VPC. The default VPC has configurations in place that make this experimentation process a lot easier when you're first getting started with AWS. If we scroll down, we will also select the role that will be used by the application, though this won't come into play until later when we have our S3 bucket created. Then we are going to accept the defaults and scroll down some more. In this box here, we're going to paste in a script. This script is going to run when the instance boots up. The script will download the source code to the app, start the web server and kick off the application code so it's ready to start handling requests. While you could have launched the instance, then connected to it via SSH, configured and started your application manually, we have decided to use a script to automate this process on launch. This is called user data for future reference. Then we will click next, through the defaults for storage click next again. And then here, we're going to go ahead and give our instance a name. So I'm going to click add tag, put Name for the key, and then the value will be employee-webapp and then click next. Then we will create a new security group, which is an instance-level firewall that will allow HTTP and HTTPS traffic to reach the instance. We will cover this in detail in future lessons. Then we will go ahead and click review and launch, click launch again, acknowledge the key pair and click launch. Now, it can take a few minutes for the instance to boot up. So let's go ahead and wait for that. And now it's up and running. To access the instance, I first select it, then I'll bring up this tab here and then I'll go ahead and copy the public IP address. All right, now we can paste it into a new tab. And there you go, it's up. Morgan, what do you think? - [Morgan] That looks good. It's exactly what I would expect at this point. Because there is no data being served from a database, I expect to just see the homepage with no info. So that's great. Thank you, Alana, for walking us through that. Coming up next week, we will discuss the specifics of not only EC2, but also networking on AWS, and you'll understand how everything we just kind of glossed over actually works. You'll also have a chance to build it out yourself in your own account, so stay tuned.