EC2 gives you a virtual server. A first launch involves five choices.
| Choice | Sensible start |
|---|---|
| AMI | Amazon Linux 2 (or Ubuntu Server 20.04) |
| Instance type | t2.micro, covered by the free tier for 12 months |
| Key pair | Create one and download the .pem once |
| Security group | SSH (22) from your IP only, not 0.0.0.0/0 |
| Storage | 8 GiB gp2 root volume |
chmod 400 mykey.pem
ssh -i mykey.pem ec2-user@<public-ip> # Ubuntu AMIs use "ubuntu"A security group is a stateful firewall: replies to allowed inbound traffic are permitted automatically. Stop an instance to pause compute charges (you still pay for its disk); terminate it to delete it. Assign an Elastic IP if the address must survive stop and start, and release it when unused, because idle Elastic IPs are billed.