DEV Community: Carlton Agesa

From Code to Cloud: Easily Host Your HTML Website on an EC2 Instance!

Carlton Agesa — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 10:04:13 +0000

Hello my name is Calton, a cloud engineer based in Nairoi, Kenya. In this blog post I will show you how to deploy your html code onto an Amazon EC2. Let's get started.

Choose An AWS Region.

Before you create an AWS EC2 you need to first choose your AWS region from the top right menu. Remember, you should pick a region that is near you or your customers. This way, your users will have less delay when they access your web applications.

Setting Up the EC2 Instance:

Search for "EC2" at the top search bar, select "instance" at the left sidebar menu. Then click the “Launch Instance” button to start setting up your server.

Give your instance a name e.g. watchflix-ec2, this name will be displayed in AWS dashboard.
Scroll down to "Application and OS Images (Amazon Machine Image)", under quick start choose "Amazon Linux". The AMI that we are going to use is Amazon Linux 2 AMI Free Tier. For the instance type it will be t2.micro free tier.

Further scroll down to "Key pair (login)", where we are required to select our key pair if it exists otherwise select "create new key pair". Enter the key pair name of your choice, leave the default RSA and .pem as is.

Scroll down to Network settings, click Edit. For now most of the inputs except for security groups related inputs will be left as default.
Provide the security group name and description of your choice e.g. watchflix-sg.

Now, pay close attention here. Under "Inbound Security Group Rules" we are going to add two rules.

The first rule is for port 22 which is already present. Port 22 allows you to SSH into your EC2 instance. Since port 22 allows access into our EC2 we need to change our source type to limit it only to our IP address - this is a security best practice.

The second rule we are going to add is on port 80. Opening this port will allow users on the internet to access our website. Click "Add security group rule" and under type select HTTP from the dropdown menu. Notice how the port changes to 80? OK. For the source type, we are going to allow traffic on port 80 to come from anywhere on the internet. Under Source, select Anywhere on IPv4 — this will bring up 0.0.0/0 automatically

Once done tweaking, click "Launch instance" at the bottom right part of the page.

EC2 Instance Connect

EC2 Instance Connect allows you to connect to Linux instances using SSH without managing SSH public keys. This can improve security, simplify workflow, and improve auditing and compliance.

To use the EC2 Connect terminal, you can connect to an Amazon EC2 instance using the Amazon EC2 console:

Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/
In the navigation pane, select Instances
Select the instance and choose Connect
Select the EC2 Instance Connect tab
For Connection type, choose Connect using EC2 Instance Connect
Verify the username
Choose Connect to open a terminal window

Installing a Web Server:
First things first, we need to change to the root user, type sudo su on your terminal.

To update to the latest system security patches type yum update -y.
Type yum install -y httpd is used to install the Apache HTTP Server on a Linux system, this allows us to serve web content over HHTTP

Next we need to change directory from ec2 to html, to do this type cd /var/www/html. Notice the directory change? Good!

We are now going to download file to our EC2 using the Linux command wget. Type wget https://github.com/carlagesa/watchflix/archive/refs/heads/main.zip. Confirm that it successfully downloaded the main.zip file, you can do this by typing ls

Upon confirmation, we need to unzip (type unzip main.zip) and copy all of our unzipped web files into the html directory (type cp -r watchflix-main/* /var/www/html/).
To confirm this you can type ls on the terminal.
Also type rm -rf watchflix-main main.zip to remove the zipped files we don't require.

And that's basically it, now we just have to start our service using systemctl enable httpd and systemctl start httpd

Accessing the Web App:
Lets open our EC2 dashbaord and select our instance and go to the details below to copy the Public IPv4 address.Open a new tab and paste the address, Voila! Now we can access our website.

Building Clock Me In a sign in management system that consumes a GeoLocation API using Vanilla JavaScript

Carlton Agesa — Mon, 20 Jun 2022 10:03:03 +0000

Hello there! Through this blog post I'm going to share with you how I managed to build a employee/student attendance management system that will be used to monitor the attendance of students and employees inside organizations.

What does the project aim to overcome?
The process of tracking working times has always been a complicated task. Over the years, several solutions have been developed to record the presence of employees. The most popular of these traditional manual attendance tracking systems are the time card, the perforation clock, and the time sheets.
The main disadvantages of such methods are :

There is a risk in human error.
Employees/students can commit time theft.
Manual entry is very time consuming.
Loss of private data such as mobile, Identification numbers and names.

Tech stack

The project firstly consumes an API provided by ipapi.io to get the current location of the users and cross-references it with the
workstation IP address
For this project I went with HTML, CSS & Vanilla JavaScript to provide a working product.
Lastly I decide to host the project on GitHub projects.

Project Links
Link to project code
Link to my GitHub profile
Let us connect on Twitter

How to get started with Cloud Computing | AWS Cloud .

Carlton Agesa — Mon, 17 Jan 2022 08:44:01 +0000

Hello,👋 cloud enthusiast.
In this article, we'll cover the concepts you need to build that solid foundation to implement Cloud Computing technologies.
Let's get started knowing what is cloud computing and the AWS cloud.

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, you can access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS)

What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)? Many might ask ,well Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

While benefiting from services that are made available by AWS, Services such as the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing

Amazon EC2 Is a virtual computing environment that provides scalable computing capacity on AWS cloud.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps you maintain availability and dynamically scale your infrastructure by adding and removing EC2 instances.

Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (EBL) helps in automatically distributing the load from incoming traffics to multiple EC2 instances, not allowing one EC2 instance to do the job, EBL works both at the frontend and the backend, EBL runs on the regional level.

Who is using cloud computing?

Organizations of every type, size, and industry are using the cloud for a wide variety of use cases, such as data backup, disaster recovery, email, virtual desktops, software development and testing, big data analytics, and customer-facing web applications.

Where and how to get started learning AWS cloud

The best and most effective way to start learning about AWS cloud, is by using the materials made available by AWS. There are tons of learning materials made available for free at the AWS Website and are completely FREE.

Learning resources to get you started

AWS Digital Training

AWS Skills Builder is a self paced digital training, with more than 500 digital courses developed by AWS experts to help you improve on your career and achieve your goals and is available any time. All you have to do is create an account, pick your area of interest and get started.

AWS Educate is a global program that provides students with resources for building their skills in the cloud, the program is completely free with access to content, training path and a job board with employment opportunities.
To get started with the Educate program all you need to do is register for an account and get approved by AWS.

AWS re/start is a full time class-room based training program that prepares individuals with career in the cloud and connection to a potential employer.

AWS re/Start curriculum teaches AWS Cloud fundamentals to help learners succeed in entry-level cloud positions. Through scenario-based exercises, hands-on labs, and coursework, learners build Linux, Python, networking, security, and relational database skills.

Learners receive job-specific training on building effective front-line support, troubleshooting, escalation, and task automation techniques. AWS re/Start also provides learners with professional skills including effective communication, collaboration, resume writing, and interview coaching to prepare them for employer meetings and interviews.

AI and ML scholarship program for the individuals interested in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can join the Scholarship program which is in collaboration with Intel and Udacity, it aims to help underrepresented and underserved high school and college students learn foundational ML concepts to prepare them for careers in AI and ML.

Best Practices

The best way to solidify the things you are learning from the above resources is by practicing hands-on labs, This way you will be putting your knowledge in good practice.

To practice the hands-on labs you will need to create an amazon free tier account which will give you access to AWS services for twelve months for free.
note Not all services are available with the free tier account.

I hope this blog has been of help to you. I f your enjoyed this blog give it a like.You can reach me on
LinkedIn