Launching your first EC2 Instance
Adjust your expectations. Make no mistake: you are configuring a naked server just as you would if you were configuring a brand new instance in your own environment. You are renting space and compute power from Amazon. Eventually, we should see preconfigured ColdFusion instances once licensing issues are resolved. Until then, you’re on your own.
From the moment you start creating an account to the time you have your first live, web-accessible, ColdFusion instance, give yourself at least 3 hours. It’s not that it’s complicated, it’s that you’ll do a lot of waiting… waiting on your first EC2 instance to boot, waiting for software to download, and waiting for software to install.*
These terms will have no meaning to you… yet.
If you are blessed, as I am, with a loving spouse and beautiful children, you know that all chairs — especially ones facing computing devices — are equipped with sensors that, upon ass hitting seat, send out warning signals indicating that you are about to engage in illicit bit fiddling which must at all costs be interrupted. “Daddy!! I need milk!”, and its ilk. Take heart. Amazon’s instances are not necessarily throwaway VMs that turn to rags upon the stroke of midnight.
You have two choices with any VMs you create during this session: “stop” and “terminate”. It’s quite simple. Stop means “shut down, as I wish to use ye later”. Terminate means “Yer dead ta me”. A stopped instance can be rebooted. A terminated instance can only be mourned and forgotten.
When creating your first intstance, don’t Terminate anything. Choose “Stop” instead. *You will not pay any more for stopped instances
Once you’ve signed up, you’ll go to your AWS Console: https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home
It’ll be empty to start. You should have some tabs at the top of the screen. Click the EC2 tab. If it’s not available, or if it gives you a screen indicating you haven’t signed up for EC2 yet, go through the steps to sign up. Again, don’t fret: you’re not signing away your mortgage or jeopardizing your family’s supper.
Once signed up for EC2, you’ll have some links in your AWS Console to “Launch Instance”. Clicking that will take you to the “Request Instances” Wizard.
Here’s your first “real” decision, and you needn’t labor over it. Essentially, you’re choosing a “base” platform on which to build your first ColdFusion AMI. This may seem daunting at first, considering just how many AMIs are available. My advice is to not sweat it. If you’re familiar with Windows, use Windows. If you’re familiar with Linux, use linux. If all you know is “I want Windows”, or “I want Linux”, then choose one of the Win or Linux AMIs that appears on the initial “Quick Start” screen. These are generally either 32 or 64 bit.
If you choose 64 bit, you’re going to pay more. The reason is that EC2 comes in a variety of “sizes”, from “small” to humongous. Obviously, 32 bit doesn’t do humongous because 32 bit can only address so much memory.
My advice: don’t expect to make the best decision right away. You’ll most likely end up configuring a different kind of server eventually. For now, concentrate on getting started, not getting it right
to get started, choose “Launch Instances” as opposed to Spot instances. Spot instances are a way to save money, but they may add a bit of time onto your Getting Started experience. If you’re choosing Windows, it doesn’t matter anyway because the price is the same.
In the Instance Details screen, keep the defaults. Click through.
In the next screen, you’ll be prompted for some key-value pairs. These are only meaningful to you. For example, you get prompted with a “Name” key… give it a name that’s meaningful to you… “Windows Attempt #1”, or “Linux Attempt #1”, or something like that. Click through.
On the next screen, you’ll be prompted about Key Pairs. These are critical. Presumably this is your first time through, so click “Create a new KeyPair” and give it a name. Click to download the file. Again, keep it secret, keep it safe. This will be a “.pem” file.
On the next screen you’ll be prompted to create a Security Group for this new instance. Think of a Security Group as a firewall. Once you assign a SG to an instance, that’s it. You live with it forever. This does NOT mean you can’t change the configuration of this group! You can.
At the very least, to start, you’ll want to Add “SSH” as a rule. No, Windows servers don’t have SSH, but you’re going to install it, so add the rule now.
Give this Security Group a meaningful name, like “Win2k8” or some such thing.
Once you launch an instance, the meter starts running. So don’t launch an instance and forget about it for 3 months. You’re now being billed until you stop this instance.
Congratulations. You’ve launched your first AWS EC2 instance. It’s going to take a while to spin up, perhaps 15 minutes or more, so go grab a beer.
If you go back to your AWS Console, you’ll see your instances in the Instances tab. It’ll be marked as “Running”, and my experience is that it takes 15-30 minutes for it to become available for you to connect to it. If you right click on that instance, you’ll have a number of options. Right now, click on the “Get System Log” option. It’ll pop up a window, and you’ll probably see something like “Gathering metadata” or “Rebooting” or some such thing. After a while, it’ll indicate that it’s “ready”, which means you can connect to it.
If you’re running a Windows Instance, you’ll need to get the initial Windows password, via the “Get Windows password” option in the menu. This will prompt you for the contents of your keypair file that you downloaded earlier. Open that file in a text editor, and copy the entire contents. Paste that chunk into this window, and it’ll take you through the process of getting the admin password. This, too, might take some time. Be patient. Beer #2 doesn’t hurt. I’d be remiss if I didn’t suggest a Terrapin Big Hoppy Monster. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t at this point direct you to Pintley.com, a ColdFusion-powered site for beer lovers. (Noooo, I don’t have a problem. I just love great beer. And ColdFusion). Now, then…
Once you have that, select “Connect”, and you’ll get an option to “download a shortcut file”. This is a typical windows “.rdp” file, which should be familiar to you if you’ve RDP’’d into a windows server before.
Go through the RDP connection screens, and use “administrator” as the username, and that password as the password.
You’re in. You now have a brand new server (a virtual one, albeit). Now it’s time to turn this thing into a ColdFusion server. It’s way beyond the scope of this document to explain how to install and configure most of this software. I trust that you know how to create a CF server and that, if you don’t, you know how to find the resources to teach you. From now on, I’ll explain the important things you’ll need to do as you install and configure this server.
At this point, I’m going to describe how to set up a Windows server. If you’re on Linux, you know how to do all of this already.
I hope, at some point, Adobe will either provide supported AMIs or allow us to publish our own AMIs. As of this writing, neither are true. This means you need to start from scratch.
Download the following:
Required
- firefox or chrome. You’ll need to change the permissions on IE to download files. Do it once, to give you permission to download a decent browser. Then go drink another Big Hoppy Monster to eradicate the memory of dealing with IE for the night. Once you have a suitable browser installed:
- Apache web server. Or, if you like, stick with IIS that’s already on the server. If you prefer IIS, I still respect you, though I do fear for your sanity.
- ColdFusion
- The latest CF updater
- Any CF hotfixes
- A respectable text editor, like Notepad++ or Notepad2 or Textpad. This is listed as required because Notepad sucks. Period.
- [WinSSH|http://www.bitvise.com/winsshd]] by bitvise. I tried FreeSSH and it didn’t work on Windows 2008 (The service would run, but the GUI wouldn’t load). YMMV. WinSSH licensing seemed reasonable to me, and it worked flawlessly.
Optional
- Launchy . Because a man without a key launcher just ain’t livin’.
- Tortoise SVN
- Git Bash
- BareTail if you want to sanely read log files
Install the above just as you would on your own server. Essentially, you’re now on your own server, except you’re renting it. Start with the webserver (apache), then go to CF and all the hotfixes. You’ll likely need to restart a few times… it is Windows, after all. If you’re on Linux, you won’t have read this far so no worries.
By now, 4 beers or so in, you should have CF running and be able to connect to CFAdmin (localhost/CFIDE/administrator). Guess what… everyone else can get to it, too, publicly. No, they don’t know your password, but you’ll want to lock it down. If you’ve installed apache, here’s how to do it (thanks Jason Dean !)
In your Apache httpd.conf, add these lines:# Prevent external CFIDE access
<Location /CFIDE>
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1
Allow CFIDE access for scripts (ajaxy goodness, etc)
<Location /CFIDE/scripts>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
When you created a Security Group, it already had Port 80 open for web traffic, and you added Port 22 for SSH. That’s on the AWS side, but you’ll also need to configure it in Windows. This is easy:
- Start —> Windows Firewall —>Change settings
- Exceptions Tab
- Add Port
- Add port 80
- Add port 22
Create a new user account named “EC2-user”. Password-protect that account. I chose the name “EC2” because the official Amazon Linux distros use that name, and the Eclipse tools don’t make it easy (if possible) to use different users for different servers (more on the Eclipse tools later).
Log out of that RDP session and log in as ec2-user, with the password you chose, to ensure that everything is correctly configured.
If you want to more easily deploy code to Windows, you’ll probably do so over SSH. This means you need an SSHd server and at least one account with permisions.
Assuming you’ve installed the WinSSH software linked above, you can now associate this ec2-user with SSH. To do so, open WinSSH, click the “settings” link, Click the Windows Accounts tab, and add the Windows ec2-user.
Who knew that setting up a server would be the same amount of work as building you own CF Server? Well… that’s what you’re doing, so it shouldn’t be a surprise, Just because you’re paying by the hour doesn’t mean you get any work for free (until Adobe provides AMIs…)
Assuming you have set up your web server, installed ColdFusion, and opened the ports in both Amazon Security Group and Windows Firewall, your server is now online. Put a test.cfm file in your web root (wherever you have that configured in your webserver), give it contents like #now()#.
From within that server (i.e. RDP’d into it), load that file at [[http://localhost/test.cfm]. If you see the current date and time, you’re almost there.
If you’ve followed all of the above, a test .cfm page loads correctly at localhost. Now we need to ensure it’s available publicly. On your AWS console, click on your instance. In the bottom frame, you’ll see 2 URLs, a “private” and a “public”. The private will be a 10.xxx address, and the public will be an “ec2-xxx” domain. Right now, we’re interested in that public domain. Copy it. It’ll be something inscrutable like “ec2-174-129-164-113.compute-1.amazonaws.com”. From your machine — NOT in your RDP screen but your “this is where I pay my bills and search for recipes and play Elmo games with my kids” machine, Paste that into your browser. It’ll be something like “[http://ec2-174-129-164-113.compute-1.amazonaws.com/test.cfm|]]”.
You should get the current date and time, similar to what you saw when running from localhost a few minutes ago
If it spins and you get a timeout, or you get a “connection dropped” error, your firewall is most likely misconfigured.
At this point, you have ColdFusion installed. It’s accessible externally. This instance is configured with useful software.
You now ask yourself: is this a good “source” from which to build future servers?
Do I need to install additional software? What software am I missing?
Grab another Big Hoppy Monster, go kiss your spouse, and sleep on it. You’re building a server. You want the right tools. You’ve earned some cred. Go kiss the kids and tell them that Daddy/Mommy kicked some ass tonight.
Next up: we bundle this server into an AMI. This is the magic — and the terror — of cloud computing. You can now spin up 1, or a 1000+, servers. In a few clicks.