Build an Amazon EC2 Linux instance

In the previous post we spoke about cloud computing platform from Amazon and described setup AWS account procedure. For all new AWS customers Amazon provides majority of their services for free during one year. All these facilities enough to launch simple web application, organize DB, test existing application in the cloud or simply grab some experience with AWS. Each month Amazon provides free quote on their services, like:
- 750 hours/month of Amazon EC2 Linux micro instance (this is enough to run continuously each month)
- 750 hours/month of an Amazon ELB
- 30 GB/month of Amazon EBS (plus 2 million I/Os)
- 5 GB/month of Amazon S3 (plus 20,000 Get requests and 2,000 Put requests)
And only if your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard rates.

Create an Amazon Web Services account

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform with a bunch of services. The most popular of these services are Amazon EC2 (provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud), Amazon EBS (provides block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances) and Amazon S3 (provides service for storing and retrieving data, at any time, from anywhere on the web).

The realy great thing that new AWS customers are able to try all these services for free - AWS introducing a free usage tier.

The AWS sign-up process is pretty straightforward and fully automated. The process may take from several minutes to half an hour (Amazon may verify your identity by the phone call), but you have to do it once.