My First Hands-on with AWS: Configuring EC2 and Deploying a Simple Website

After years of interest in cloud computing—soaking up some theoretical knowledge and understanding some core concepts, (shared my interest & journey on LinkedIn)—

I finally dived into hands-on, on AWS EC2, and I must say—it was both exciting and a little nerve-wracking at first. 😅 But after going through the process, I feel more confident in working with cloud services. So, I’m sharing my step-by-step experience of configuring an EC2 instance and deploying a simple website.

If you’re just starting with AWS, I hope this helps you get up and running faster! 🚀

Step 1: Launching an EC2 Instance: Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides virtual servers to run applications. My first task was to set up an instance where my website would be hosted.

Creating an EC2 Instance

1. I logged into my AWS Management Console.
2. I Navigated to the EC2 Dashboard and clicked Launch Instance.
3. Configured the instance with:

• Amazon Machine Image (AMI): I chose Amazon Linux 2 (Free Tier).
• Instance Type: t2.micro (also Free Tier-friendly).
• Key Pair: Created a new key pair for secure SSH access.
• Security Group: Allowed SSH (port 22) and HTTP (port 80).

Clicked Launch and my instance was up in a few seconds!

Step 2: Connecting to the EC2 Instance via SSH
Once the instance was running, I needed to access it remotely from my terminal.

On my local machine, I ran:

ssh -i my-key.pem ec2-user@my-instance-ip

And boom! I was inside my EC2 instance.

Step 3: Installing a Web Server (Apache)
To serve a website, I installed Apache (HTTPD) on my instance using the following commands:

sudo yum update -y
sudo yum install -y httpd
sudo systemctl start httpd
sudo systemctl enable httpd

It is best practice to always update your server before installing any software. In this case:
• Apache (or Nginx) is the web server responsible for serving your website.
• yum is the package management system used on Amazon Linux.
• sudo yum update ensures that all installed packages are up to date before proceeding with new installations.

By running these commands, I successfully set up Apache to start automatically whenever the server reboots.
To confirm it was running, I visited my public IP in a browser and saw the default Apache page.

Step 4: Uploading My Website Files
To test my web server, I created a simple index.html file inside Apache’s root directory:

echo "<h1>Hello from my first AWS-hosted website!</h1>" | sudo tee /var/www/html/index.html

After running this command, I refreshed my browser, and my website was live!

Breaking Down the Command

echo "<h1>Hello from my first AWS-hosted website!</h1>" | sudo tee /var/www/html/index.html

This command creates a simple HTML file (index.html) inside the Apache root directory (/var/www/html/) and writes a message inside it. Let’s break it down step by step:

1. echo "

   Hello from my first AWS-hosted website!

   " • The echo command prints text to the terminal. • Here, it’s printing the HTML content:

Hello from my first AWS-hosted website!

1. | (Pipe Operator)
   • The pipe (|) takes the output of one command (echo) and passes it as input to another command (tee).

2. sudo tee /var/www/html/index.html
   • tee takes input from echo and writes it to the file (index.html).
   • sudo ensures that tee has the necessary permissions to write to /var/www/html/, which requires root access.

Final Outcome:
• A new file index.html is created (or overwritten) inside /var/www/html/.
• The file contains:

Hello from my first AWS-hosted website!

This becomes the homepage of your website when accessed via a browser.

Using EC2 for computing is extremely flexible, cost-effective, and fast compared to running your servers on-premises.

Next, I’ll be exploring:
The same topic with practical pictorials or videos.
Automating deployments with Bash scripts

Connect With Me

GitHub: https://github.com/Glory-cloud-solution
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glory-ugochukwu-

💬 I’m actively learning and growing my expertise in cloud architecture, Terraform, Linux, and automation scripting to enhance cloud-based solutions and share insights on AWS hands-on labs. If you’re learning AWS too, or you are a professional, let’s connect! Share your questions or tips in the comments. Let’s grow together!

AWS #EC2 #CloudComputing #DevOps #Linux #WebHosting