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Lab 006: Launch EC2 Instance

Requirements​

The Nautilus DevOps team is strategizing the migration of a portion of their infrastructure to the AWS cloud. Recognizing the scale of this undertaking, they have opted to approach the migration in incremental steps rather than as a single massive transition. To achieve this, they have segmented large tasks into smaller, more manageable units.

For this task, create an EC2 instance with following requirements:

  1. The name of the instance must be datacenter-ec2.

  2. You can use the Amazon Linux AMI to launch this instance.

  3. The Instance type must be t2.micro.

  4. Create a new RSA key pair named datacenter-kp.

  5. Attach the default (available by default) security group.

  6. Create the instance in us-east-1 region.

Note

This page keeps the original requirement statement and provides one deterministic AWS CLI workflow to launch the instance.

Prerequisites​

  • AWS CLI is installed and authenticated on aws-client.
  • Credentials are available (use showcreds when required).
  • The active identity can create key pairs and launch EC2 instances in us-east-1.

Steps​

For the AWS credentials, enter showcreds command on aws-client host to retrieve the credentials. For further details, check out the Project Nautilus documentation.

To create a EC2 instance with specified requirements using the AWS CLI, you can follow these steps:

#!/bin/bash

# Step 1: Create Key Pair
aws ec2 create-key-pair --key-name datacenter-kp --query 'KeyMaterial' --output text > datacenter-kp.pem
chmod 400 datacenter-kp.pem

# Step 2: Retrieve the Amazon Linux AMI ID
AMI_ID=$(aws ec2 describe-images \
    --region us-east-1 \
    --filters "Name=name,Values=amzn2-ami-hvm-2.0.????????-x86_64-gp2" \
              "Name=state,Values=available" \
    --query "Images | sort_by(@, &CreationDate)[-1].ImageId" \
    --output text)

# Step 3: Get Default Security Group
SECURITY_GROUP_ID=$(aws ec2 describe-security-groups \
    --region us-east-1 \
    --filters "Name=group-name,Values=default" \
    --query 'SecurityGroups[0].GroupId' \
    --output text)

# Step 4: Launch EC2 Instance
INSTANCE_ID=$(aws ec2 run-instances \
    --region us-east-1 \
    --image-id $AMI_ID \
    --instance-type t2.micro \
    --key-name datacenter-kp \
    --security-group-ids $SECURITY_GROUP_ID \
    --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=Name,Value=datacenter-ec2}]' \
    --query 'Instances[0].InstanceId' \
    --output text)

# Step 5: Verify Instance
echo "Instance launched with ID: $INSTANCE_ID"
aws ec2 describe-instances \
    --region us-east-1 \
    --instance-ids $INSTANCE_ID \
    --query 'Reservations[0].Instances[0].[InstanceId,State.Name,KeyName,Tags]' \
    --output table

Verification​

  • Confirm the instance named datacenter-ec2 is in running state.
  • Confirm instance type is t2.micro and key pair is datacenter-kp.
aws ec2 describe-instances \
    --region us-east-1 \
    --filters "Name=tag:Name,Values=datacenter-ec2" \
    --query "Reservations[0].Instances[0].{InstanceId:InstanceId,State:State.Name,InstanceType:InstanceType,KeyName:KeyName}" \
    --output table

Resources​

AWS CLI Command Reference