These days in the IT world, everything is about the cloud. Cloud services, cloud security, private clouds, hybrid clouds -- the list goes on. It's
enough to make your head spin. For all this recent talk about cloud computing, one company has been offering a variety of cloud services for more than
five years now. Amazon's cloud offerings, known as Amazon Web Services (AWS), exist in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) category. When you work
with AWS, you're responsible for managing and maintaining your own virtual machines (VMs), including the software that you choose to run on top of
them. This is in contrast to companies such as Salesforce.com, which offers Software as a Service (SaaS), or Microsoft, which offers Windows Azure as a
Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Many misconceptions surround AWS in the IT community. IT pros think that AWS is a developer technology or that only VMs that run Linux can run on the
service. It doesn't help that many AWS-specific terms can be confusing. What, for example, is Elastic Block Storage (EBS)? Fortunately, getting an AWS
account and a Windows Server VM running on the service is straightforward and inexpensive. In this article, I'll go through the steps to create such a
VM and connect to it via Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).
Sign Up, Sign In
The first thing you'll need is an AWS account. If you already have an Amazon.com account, you're practically there. Head over to aws.amazon.com and
click the Sign Up Now button on the right side of the page. (If you don't already have an Amazon.com account, you can create one here.) Sign in with
your Amazon.com email address and password, then complete the remaining AWS sign-up steps.
After you've signed up and signed in, you're presented with a rather stark dashboard, as Figure 1 shows. The top tabs show the various services that
AWS offers. Take some time and explore them all. Some have an additional Sign Up button that you can click if you want to enable that particular AWS
service for use. There's no harm in enabling access to all these services: With AWS, you pay only for the resources that you're actually using.
Figure 1: A brand new AWS dashboard
After you're familiar with the dashboard offerings, click the EC2 tab. This is where you'll create and work with your Windows Server VMs.
Create an Instance
To get your Windows Server VM going, click the Launch Instance button. This action brings up the Request Instances Wizard, in which you can select an
Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to run. AMIs come from a variety of sources, including the AWS community and Amazon itself. You'll use the Microsoft Windows
Server 2008 R2 Base AMI that's presented in the Quick Start tab, as Figure 2 shows. (Unfortunately, no Windows AMIs currently qualify for the AWS free
usage tier, which specifies the use of Linux. Still, for a quick test of the service, you'll be paying literally a few cents. Click the link for more information
about AWS pricing.)
Figure 2: Choosing an AMI
After you select the AMI image, the next screen of the wizard prompts you for details about the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance that you want to
create. As Figure 3 shows, you need only one instance; the Availability Zone doesn't matter in this situation. I selected a large instance type to up
the available RAM from 613MB to 7.5GB and add an additional CPU core.
Figure 3: Setting up an instance
On this screen, you'll supply more details about the instance that you want. Here, you run into some of that confusing terminology. You don't need to
select a particular Kernel ID or RAM Disk ID, but what are Termination Protection and Shutdown Behavior? In AWS parlance, when you select Shut Down
from the Windows Start Menu, the EC2 instance can be either stopped or terminated. It might be better to think of these options as "dormant" or
"destroyed." You can restart a stopped instance, at will. A terminated instance is destroyed and cannot be restarted, hence the Termination Protection
check box for those who choose Terminate as a shutdown behavior. I want my instance to stop only when I select Shut Down, so I'm leaving the Shutdown
Behavior default set to Stop.
The next screen allows for user-specified key-value pairs, to ease management. You don't need to define any of these, so simply move on.