Hadoop Tutorial 4: Start an EC2 Instance

Creating an EC2 Instance refers to the action of starting a server on Amazon using one's credential, and then connecting to it using ssh.

Method #1: Using the AWS Console

Steps

The steps are fairly simple:

• Connect to the AWS console, and then select Amazon EC2
• Click on Launch Instance
• When the instance is created, right click on it and click on Connect

• Copy/Paste the ssh command into a shell that you will have started

 ssh -i dft.pem root@ec2-174-129-165-180.compute-1.amazonaws.com

• Make sure you have downloaded a private key file to your .ssh directory first. This is done by
  • Selecting your account
  • clicking on Credentials
  • selecting the X.509 certificate tab
  • and clicking on Create New. A page will open allowing you to download your pem files. One will be the private key, of the form pk-WMxxxxxxxxxx.pem, the other the certicifcate, of the form cert-WMxxxxxxxxxx.pem. Both should be put in your .ssh dirctory.

Method #2: Using the EC2 Tools

Steps

• Download the EC2 Tools
• install them in ~/bin/ec2-api-tools
• Download the pem files containing your private key and certificate from the Amazon EC2 page (see step above)
• Modify your .bash_profile file and set several variables:

PATH=$PATH:/Users/thiebaut/bin/ec2-api-tools/bin

# Amazon AWS/EC2 tools 
export EC2_HOME=/Users/thiebaut/bin/ec2-api-tools
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ssh/pk-WMW2M4ZVFMCZJXSXJN4D7ZS4RMTBJ7VV.pem
export EC2_CERT=~/.ssh/cert-WMW2M4ZVFMCZJXSXJN4D7ZS4RMTBJ7VV.pem

• Source the .bash_profile file

source .bash_profile

• Test the ec2 tools:

ec2-describe-images -a

IMAGE	ami-4130d028	/allette-ps-public/image.manifest.xml	001408692910	available	public
		i386	machine	aki-a71cf9ce	ari-a51cf9cc		instance-store
IMAGE	ami-d334d4ba	/ardito/AMI/centos5.3-v0.1/image.manifest.xml	800541489450	available	public

i386 machine instance-store