🚀 AWS Cloud Training – Day 1: Getting Started with EC2 & Environments

#aws #training #learning

This week, I started my AWS training, and Day 1 was all about getting hands-on with EC2 instances, Linux basics, and web application deployment. In this post, I’ll share the key concepts I learned and how I practiced them step by step.

🖥️ Environments in the Software Lifecycle

Before working with servers, I learned about the different environments used in application development:

Development → For coding & initial unit testing.

Testing (QA) → Quality assurance checks.

UAT (User Acceptance Testing) → End-user validation.

CAT (Client Acceptance Testing) → Final client sign-off before production.

These environments ensure that the application is thoroughly tested before going live.

☁️ Launching an EC2 Instance

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) allows us to run virtual machines in the cloud. Here’s how I launched my first instance:

Launch instance → Selected 1 instance and tagged it as abinaya-vm.

Choose instance type → t2.micro (Free Tier).

Select AMI → Linux AMI (preloaded with Python/Java).

Secure access → Generated a key pair (.pem → converted to .ppk for PuTTY).

Networking & Security → Configured Security Groups for:

SSH (port 22) → Secure login

HTTP (port 80) → Web traffic

HTTPS (port 443) → Secure web apps

Storage → Default 8GB EBS root volume.

🐧 Linux Basics

Once inside the instance, I practiced essential Linux commands:

mkdir, ls, touch, rm → File/folder operations

cd and cd .. → Navigation

chmod → Manage permissions (read = 4, write = 2, execute = 1)

history → Review past commands

Example:

chmod 777 /var/www/html

This command gives full access to all users (not secure for production but useful for learning).

🌐 Hosting a Web Application

To serve a simple web application:

Install Apache

yum install httpd

Start Apache

service httpd start

Check status

service httpd status

Then I placed my HTML files into /var/www/html and accessed them via the public IP of my EC2 instance.

For file transfer, I used WinSCP to copy files from my Windows machine to the server.

✅ Key Takeaways

Keep your key pairs safe — without them, you lose server access.

Use Elastic IPs to keep a permanent public IP (since default ones reset on reboot).

In production, always think of scaling and monitoring → Load Balancers, Auto Scaling, and CloudWatch.

💡 Final Thoughts

Day 1 gave me a strong foundation in EC2, Linux, and deploying a basic web app in the cloud. I’m excited to continue learning and will be documenting Day 2 & Day 3 as well. 🚀

👉 If you’re also learning AWS, feel free to share your journey in the comments!