10 Minute AWS Homelab
Full tutorial
Hello, Hoodies!
The start of any good homelab is a Linux server. What better place to do it than the BEST cloud platform known to man - AWS (sorry not sorry Azure)
The process couldn’t be simpler and takes about 10 minutes.
Let’s dive in.
First step, create your AWS account. Go to aws.amazon.com to get started and click “Create Account”
NOTE: For this account, you can choose the FREE and PERSONAL plan. First choose FREE, then choose PERSONAL. Your VM should cost you nothing to operate at the size we’re using.
The rest is boring admin setup stuff: confirm your email, phone number, enter a CC, etc (you can do that on your own)
Once you do that, go to your AWS homepage and search “ec2” in the search bar.
WHAT IS EC2??? It stands for Elastic Compute Cloud. This is AWS’s virtual machine service name. The ELASIC part is because it has the option to scale with your workloads, but we won’t be doing that part here. Keeping it small, simple, and most importantly, FREE!
Once you’re here, you’re going to hit the butterscotch “Launch Instance” button.
PRO TIP: The orange butterscotch colored button is usually the button you need to hit to do the thing in AWS.
The rest is pretty straightforward:
Name your server (anything you want)
Choose your image (default ubuntu is fine)
Choose instance TYPE (meaning size/resources)
Default is t3-micro which is fine for our purposes
If you decide later you want a larger instance, you can always upsize
Create your keypair
If you already have one, you can use it, otherwise, make a new keypair
Give it a name and the defaults are fine. Then it’ll download your private key (and it’ll put your PUBLIC key on your server so you can login via SSH)
Configure networking
You can leave this as a default or do the dropdown to select your current network IP so that ONLY that IP can access the server WITH your security key login credentials
Keep the rest as default and then hit “launch instance”
And that’s it! Then you’ll get this screen while it’s cooking (takes just a few seconds)
Then you’ll see this:
Tada! You’ve made your first VM!
Want a video version of this video breaking everything down step by step? Get it for FREE in our Skool Community (also free)
Hope you enjoyed this, hope you learned something, and stick around for an announcement on our BIGGEST BLACK FRIDAY DEAL EVER 👀
Cheers,
Evan Lutz (BowTiedCyber)
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