The instance that you launched without a public IP will stay without one as it is only assignable when you launch the instance. Even having a subnet with auto assign public IP switched on will not assign a public IP to your instance if, when you launched the instance you chose not to have a … Read more
I was in a similar situation; fully managed dedicated server, LAMP, CentOS. Then we decided to move to EC2. Also, I had very little systems or linux administration experience. I have almost zero experience with Ubuntu, so I really cannot speak to which is the so-called better OS. I tried a bunch of pre-built AMI’s … Read more
According to this, this command can be used: ssh-keygen -f id_rsa -e -m pem This will convert your public key to an OpenSSL compatible format. Your private key is already in PEM format and can be used as is (as Michael Hampton stated). Double check if AWS isn’t asking for a (X.509) certificate in PEM … Read more
Right now: Small packet performance sucks under Xen (moved from the question itself to a separate answer instead) According to a user on HN (a KVM developer?) this is due to small packet performance in Xen and also KVM. It’s a known problem with virtualization and according to him, VMWare’s ESX handles this much better. … Read more
You are right, the Ubuntu EC2 EBS images don’t come with swap space configured (for 11.04 at least). The “regular” instance-type images do have a swap partition, albeit only 896 MB on the one I tested. If some process blows up and you don’t have swap space, your server could come to a crawling halt … Read more
Instead of guessing which version of RHEL a particular distro is based off, just run: rpm -E %{rhel} For Amazon Linux 2, this will give you 7.
Update 2015-02-27: This is now possible, see the answer below. Old reply: Amazon’s FAQ says it’s not possible to define a security group anywhere but at launch time.
AWS EC2 shows the SSH2 fingerprint, not the OpenSSH fingerprint everyone expects. It doesn’t say this in the UI. It also shows two completely different kinds of fingerprints depending on whether the key was generated on AWS and downloaded, or whether you uploaded your own public key. Fingerprints generated with ssh-keygen -l -f id_rsa will … Read more
Unless the instance is in a VPC, security groups can only be chosen before you start your instance for the first time. Only VPC instances can change security group. For information on VPC see here.
An AMI, as you note, is a machine image. It’s a total snapshot of a system stored as an image that can be launched as an instance. We’ll get back to AMIs in a second. Lets look at EBS. Your other two items are sub-items of this. EBS is a virtual block device. You can … Read more