Amazon EC2 Beginner's Workshop

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides on demand, self service, pay as you go computing infrastructure, including servers, storage, network, security, monitoring, load balancing, auto scaling, and more.

The focus of this presentation will be running Linux servers on EC2. The workshop will demonstrate using Ubuntu, but EC2 supports many Linux distros including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora Core, CentOS, RHEL, Gentoo, and OpenSuse.

All you need to get started is a credit card to create an Amazon account. Expenses for the workshop should be under $0.25 (yes, that's a quarter). Attendees should create their Amazon accounts _before_ this session.

Controlling EC2 resources can be done using a browser on any operating system including Linux, Mac, or Windows. (The presenter's entire company runs on EC2, managed by employees with laptops.)

By the end of the workshop you will have an AWS account and a running Linux server, which we will promptly shut down before ending the class so that you will incur no further charges until you decide to use EC2 again in the future.