Everything I'd built with AWS up to this point was S3 — storage, permissions, static hosting. Today moved into actual compute: launching a virtual machine on EC2, connecting into it remotely over RDP, and learning how to back it up and move that backup around using snapshots.
Topics Covered
- Launching an EC2 instance
- Connecting to it via RDP
- Taking EBS snapshots
- Sending and receiving snapshots
1. Launching an EC2 Instance
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is AWS's virtual machine service — instead of storing objects like S3, it gives you an actual running server you can log into and use. Launching one means choosing an AMI (Amazon Machine Image, essentially the OS template), an instance type (which determines CPU/RAM), a key pair for access, and a security group controlling what traffic can reach it.
For this lab, I launched a Windows instance on a t3.micro — small, cheap, enough to test with. A few minutes after launch, it showed up in the console as Running, with all status checks passed:
The instance state and status checks matter more than they look like at first glance — "running" just means the VM booted, while the status checks confirm the underlying hardware and the OS itself are actually healthy. A running instance that fails a status check is not one you want to trust yet.
2. Connecting via RDP
Since this was a Windows instance, the way in is RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) rather than SSH. The security group has to explicitly allow inbound traffic on port 3389 for this to work at all — by default, nothing gets in.
The process: retrieve the administrator password using the key pair created at launch, then connect using any RDP client (Windows' own Remote Desktop Connection app works fine) pointed at the instance's public IP. Once connected, it behaves exactly like a normal Windows desktop — except it's running on AWS hardware somewhere in a data center rather than the physical machine in front of me.
This is the part that made cloud computing feel tangible in a way S3 hadn't. A bucket is abstract. A full remote desktop you're actively controlling is not.
3. Taking Snapshots
A snapshot is a point-in-time backup of an EBS volume (the virtual hard disk attached to an EC2 instance). Rather than backing up files individually, a snapshot captures the entire volume's state, incrementally — after the first full snapshot, later ones only store the blocks that changed.
I took three snapshots over the course of the lab, each showing as Completed with the full volume captured:
Snapshots are the foundation for a lot of what makes EC2 usable in production: recovering from a bad update, migrating a volume to a new instance, or scaling by launching new instances directly from a known-good image.
4. Sending and Receiving Snapshots
Beyond just creating them locally, snapshots can be copied — including across regions and across AWS accounts. Sharing a snapshot means modifying its permissions to grant another account access, after which that account can copy it into their own environment and create a volume from it.
This is the piece that turns a snapshot from "personal backup" into an actual transfer mechanism — moving a fully configured server environment from one place to another without manually reinstalling anything, just by handing over the snapshot and letting the other side spin up a volume from it.
Why This Matters
S3 taught me about storage and access control in the abstract. EC2 and snapshots are the first time I was working with something that behaves like a real, persistent machine — one that can be backed up, broken, restored, and handed off. That distinction between object storage and block storage tied to a running instance is a core piece of the AWS mental model, and this was the lab where it actually clicked instead of just being a definition I'd read.
What's Next
Now that I can launch, connect to, and snapshot an instance, the next logical step is automating this instead of doing it by hand through the console — looking at either the AWS CLI or Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or CloudFormation) to spin up the same setup repeatably.
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