What is AWS and How to Create Your First EC2 Instance.

Mohd Fazil — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:46:12 +0000

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform provided by Amazon. It offers many services such as virtual servers, cloud storage, domain management, databases, networking, and auto-scaling infrastructure for applications.

AWS is widely used by individuals, startups, and large companies because it allows them to use powerful cloud infrastructure without purchasing expensive physical hardware.

Why Use AWS Instead of Physical Servers?
Running your own physical servers can be very expensive and requires hardware maintenance, electricity, cooling systems, security management and networking setup.

AWS solves these problems by providing virtual servers and managed cloud services that can scale according to your needs.

For example, if your application suddenly receives high traffic, AWS can automatically increase server resources to handle the load.

Now we are going to create our first ec2 instance on AWS, for this we need to create an AWS account , so create your and payment method.

What is EC2?
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is one of the most popular AWS services. It allows users to create virtual machines, also called instances, in the cloud.
You can use EC2 instances to host websites, run backend servers, deploy APIs, run databases and test applications.

Step 1 :- Click “ Launch instances” button.

Step 2 :- Name your instance.

Step 3 :- Select your Operating System.
Operating system (OS) is like the OS in our computer we can use this in server for commands and use to install different packages.

Step 4 :- Select your instances based on your use case.
In instance type we select CPU, memory (RAM), storage, and networking capacity of your virtual server (EC2 instance)

Step 5 :- Enter your key pair or generate one if you don’t have one.
An AWS Key Pair is a secure set of security credentials used to prove your identity when connecting to Amazon EC2 instances. It consists of a public key (stored by AWS) and a private key (downloaded by you) used for SSH/RDP access.It can help different developers access the instance.

Step 6 :- Configure your network settings and open ports.
Network settings in AWS refer to the configuration options and services used to define how cloud resources communicate with each other, the internet, and on-premises networks. These settings dictate network isolation, traffic routing, IP addresses, and firewall policies.

Step 7 :- Select storage based on your use case and leave advanced for later time.
In AWS, EC2 Storage Settings define how your virtual server stores and accesses data.

Step 8 :- Click “Launch instance” button.

Now our first instance is created successfully. In the next blog, I will explain how to host our application on an EC2 instance.

DEV Community: Mohd Fazil

What is AWS and How to Create Your First EC2 Instance.