Tech Talk: What I’ve been working on with Amazon Web Services lately –
First I’d like to talk about how I put this website together. I’ve really wanted a place where I could put my thoughts, but also a place where I could share the things I’ve been learning, studying, and practicing.
I’ll jump right into it. I signed into my Amazon Web Services console. Which, if you’d like to follow along, go ahead and sign up for an account here. When you create an account, you will be able to sign in to your ‘root’ account. For best-practices sake, go to AWS’s IAM (Identity and Access Management) service and create another user with your ‘root’ account user, store the credentials for the ‘root’ user account, enable multi-factor authentication on your ‘root’ account, and then going forward use the new user and that user credentials.
When you create the new user, you can provide that user with Administrative access via a role or adding that user to a Group (that has an Administrative Policy attached) to leverage all services from the AWS console and/or the AWS CLI (which I use often and love using! Check it out and download here – make sure the download is compatible for your computer/laptop/machine’s operating system).
Next, I went over to AWS’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service. This service is incredible because you can create instances in a matter of minutes and stop and terminate them as soon as you are finished with them. You can also used a pre-configured template for the root instance called a publicly available AMI (Amazon Machine Image) that have things like PHP, MySQL, and WordPress installed at launch time.
I searched with the keyword ‘blog’ and selected the first option from the AWS Marketplace – a WordPress AMI Certified by Bitnami and Automattic.
Once I specified the instance details I wanted, I reviewed and launched my instance. Once my instance had finished launching, I clicked on the instance id which led me to a dashboard with the instance details. I right clicked on my instance > Clicked on Instance Settings > then chose Get System Log. I scrolled toward the bottom of the Instance Logs and found the password I would need to log into my WordPress instance. I copied the password locally to a clipboard. I looked back at my running instance details on the Instance dashboard and found my instance’s IPv4 Public IP (example: 100.100.100.100). I went to my instance and logged in with my username and password and began customizing the site, the WordPress Theme, and adding content to each page! Finally, I went to Route53 and clicked Create Record Set, which allows me to map my IPv4 Public IP to a domain name. I had previously bought my domain name (daleyarborough.com) for about $14, so once I mapped the IP to my domain name, I cleared my browser cache (you may need to do this in order to see your website after it’s finished propagating), and voila I was able to see my site live!
Hope that helps if you are interested in trying to create your on WordPress site or spin up your first EC2 instance. Please make sure to read the AWS’s service before using them in order to avoid incurring large costs (my wordpress instance
Get more familiar with the services mentioned in this article by clicking the links below!
