High level: Some key gotcha in learning AWS

• the difficult part lies on how to setup infrastructure correctly. This requires knowledge from different areas and different AWS service.
• it is very important to learn deployment tools, like CloudFormation. And the provision tool, like Ansible.

Access AWS

There are multiple way of access AWS.

• Management console
• ssh with .pem key
• Access key and password (via CLI and SDK)
• STS
• Centrify or other method

Management Console

• default for root user
• for managed user, login with url:
  • ????

using access key and password

using STS

Related to EC2:

Access EC2 instance:

Normally, we use .pem key to login to AWS services. But there are services like Centrify that provide username and password style login method.

ssh -i /*path*/my-key-pair.pem user-name@ec2-198-51-100-1.compute-1.amazonaws.com
or 
ssh -i jinchao.pem ubuntu@54.149.233.8  # public IP

user-name is defined by AMI provider. For Amazon Linux, the user name is ec2-user. For Ubuntu, the user name is ubuntu.

• Transfer file into EC2:

scp -i /*path*/my-key-pair.pem SampleFile.txt ec2-user@ec2-198-51-100-1.compute-1.amazonaws.com:~

questions: ?

• several network concepts: hwo do they work together ?

  • network-interface
  • subnet
  • VPC
  • public and private IP
  • DNS
  • security group

• how to use roles, policy and security group to control EC2 instance