DotNetNuke in the Cloud – Part 2, Amazon EC2 – Creating an Instance

In my first article on DotNetNuke and Cloud Computing, I briefly introduced the many aspects of “Cloud Computing”. In this article I will begin to describe how to get DotNetNuke running on Amazon EC2, an “Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)” provider.

Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2)

Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) is a web service provided by Amazon Web Services that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.  The web service interfaces allow users to launch machine instances with a variety of operating systems, load them with custom applications, and run as many instances of your configured image.

Once you have created an account on Amazon Web Services (AWS) you will be able to launch a web based console which allows you to manage your EC2 services (Figure 1).

Figure 1 - Launch the AWS Console

If you are not already signed in to AWS then you will be asked to enter your Amazon credentials and you will then see the EC2 Console (Figure 2)

Figure 2 – The AWS Console Dashboard

On the left menu is a number of tasks that you can do.  For the purpose of this article we will only focus on the four of the items.

• Instances Manager

  lets you view your currently running Instances

• AMIS

  allows you to view the available Amazon Machine Images (AMIS).

• Bundle Tasks

  allows you to view the bundling tasks (more on this later)

• Security Groups

  allows you to manage Security Groups

On the top right is a summary of the resources you are currently using.  In this example I have one Key Pair (you will receive a Key Pair file when you sign up for AWS) and two Security Groups.  Security Groups allow you to open up ports for specific protocols.  For a webserver you may want to just open up ports for the HTTP Protocol (to serve web pages) and the RDP Protocol (to allow you to remote into the server) (Figure 3).

Figure 3 – The Security Groups Manager

Finally in the middle of the console is a big button that allows you to launch an instance (there is also an option to launch new instances from the Instances Manager).

Launching your first Amazon AC2 Instance

Whether you first go into the Instances Manager to launch an instance or click the “Launch Instance” button on the main Console you will start the “Launch Instance Wizard” (Figure 4).  The first page of the wizard allows you to choose the Instance you want to launch.

Figure 4 – Launching an AMI Instance

Instances are essentially virtual machines, and Amazon provides a number of basic configurations (Linux and Windows) as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).  In addition you can configure an instance and save it.  These customized AMIs can be private or public.

For this example we obviously need to select a Windows AMI and we will choose the Basic Windows Server 2003 instance, with SQL Server Express (as an instance with SQL Server costs more).

Figure 5 – Configuring the Instance

You can then select the number of instances to launch, the type of instance (in this case small or medium) the Key Pair to use and the Security Groups to use (Figure 5).  Finally click launch and your instance will be started.

In the Instances Manager you can review the status of the instance.

Figure 6 – My Instances shows the state of the Instances

You can click on a row in the Instances grid and you can view more detail about the Instance (Figure 7).

Figure 7 – Detail View for the new Instance

The important information in this screen is the Public DNS – this is the DNS mapping of your new instance (ec2-174-129-147-158.compute-1.amazonaws.com).  The important thing to note here is that the DNS mapping will be different every time you launch an instance.

Now our instance is running, the next step is to set up DotNetNuke to run on our instance and to configure our own custom AMI.  I will describe this in the Part 3 of this series.