Hadoop Tutorial 4: Start an EC2 Instance

--D. Thiebaut 16:01, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

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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:

Launch instance from AWS console

• Connect to the AWS console (see Tutorial 3 for a reminder), and then select Amazon EC2.
• In the QuickStart tab, pick "Fedora LAMP Server", as a machine to instantiate.
• Select 1 instance, pick the architecture of your choice, and No Preference for the zone.
• Select Launch Instance (Spot Instances are low-rate machines that run only when the demand is low, and the user pays less).
• Click on Continue (make sure your browser window is large enough to see the bottom part of the pop-up!)

• Use defaults for Kernel Id and RamDisk Id.
• No Monitoring
• Click on Continue

• Pick a name for your key-pair file (e.g. dftKeyPair), then click on Create New Key Pair.
• When prompted, save the key-pair file (dftKeyPair.pem) to a local directory on your computer (Desktop, for example).
• Follow the directions to create a security group (I called it dftGroup for simplicity).

• Review!

• Launch!
• Watch as the instance is created, and loads up...

• When the instance is created, right click on it and click on Connect

Connecting using SSH

• First create a working directory on your local computer (I'll assume you are using a Mac or a Linux box. Similar steps are easy to take for Windows)
• Start a Terminal window
• create a new working directory and copy the Key-Pair file into it:

 cd /
 mkdir aws
 cd aws
 cp  ~/Desktop/dftKeyPair.pem .
 chmod go-r dftKeyPair.pem
 ls -l 
 total 8
 -rw-------@ 1 thiebaut  wheel  1693 Apr 22 08:25 dftKeyPair.pem

• 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 from the Amazon EC2 Resource Center.
• install them in ~/bin/ec2-api-tools (see the Getting Started Guide from Amazon for more info).
• 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 | grep hadoop-ec2-images

• verify that a list of images is printed out.

IMAGE	ami-ee53b687	hadoop-ec2-images/hadoop-0.17.0-i386.manifest.xml	111560892610	available	public
		i386	machine	aki-a71cf9ce	ari-a51cf9cc		instance-store
IMAGE	ami-f853b691	hadoop-ec2-images/hadoop-0.17.0-x86_64.manifest.xml	111560892610	available	public
		x86_64	machine	aki-b51cf9dc	ari-b31cf9da		instance-store

	Lab Experiment #1 Run the multiprocessing version of the NQueens program on your new Instance and compare its execution time to the best time obtained so far. The multiprocessing version of the N-Queens program is available here. An easy way to time the execution of multiple runs would be: for i in {15..21} ; do echo -n $i /usr/bin/time python2.6 multiprocessingNQueens.py $i 2>&1 | grep real done