Example 9: Using Amazon EC2 Instances

To sign up for an AWS account

1. Open https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup.

2. Follow the online instructions.

   Part of the sign-up procedure involves receiving a phone call and entering a verification code on the phone keypad.

   When you sign up for an AWS account, an AWS account root user is created. The root user has access to all AWS services and resources in the account. As a security best practice, assign administrative access to a user, and use only the root user to perform tasks that require root user access.

Secure your AWS account root user

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console as the account owner by choosing Root user and entering your AWS account email address. On the next page, enter your password.

   For help signing in by using root user, see Signing in as the root user in the AWS Sign-In User Guide.

2. Turn on multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your root user.

   For instructions, see Enable a virtual MFA device for your AWS account root user (console) in the IAM User Guide.

Create a user with administrative access

1. Enable IAM Identity Center.

   For instructions, see Enabling AWS IAM Identity Center in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

2. In IAM Identity Center, grant administrative access to a user.

   For a tutorial about using the IAM Identity Center directory as your identity source, see Configure user access with the default IAM Identity Center directory in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

Sign in as the user with administrative access

• To sign in with your IAM Identity Center user, use the sign-in URL that was sent to your email address when you created the IAM Identity Center user.

  For help signing in using an IAM Identity Center user, see Signing in to the AWS access portal in the AWS Sign-In User Guide.

Assign access to additional users

1. In IAM Identity Center, create a permission set that follows the best practice of applying least-privilege permissions.

   For instructions, see Create a permission set in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

2. Assign users to a group, and then assign single sign-on access to the group.

   For instructions, see Add groups in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

To set up the cookbook

1. To use the kitchen-ec2 driver, you must have the ruby-dev package installed on your system. The following example command shows how to use aptitude to install the package on a Ubuntu system.

   sudo aptitude install ruby1.9.1-dev 

2. The kitchen-ec2 driver is a gem, which you can install as follows:

   gem install kitchen-ec2

   Depending on your workstation, this command might require sudo, or you can also use a Ruby environment manager such as RVM. This procedure was tested with version 0.8.0 of the kitchen-ec2 driver, but there are newer versions. To install a specific version, run gem install kitchen-ec2 -v <version number>.

3. You must specify an Amazon EC2 SSH key pair that Test Kitchen can use to connect to the instance. If you don't have an Amazon EC2 key pair, see Amazon EC2 Key Pairs for information on how to create one. Note that the key pair must belong to the same AWS region as the instance. The example uses US West (N. California).

   After you have selected a key pair, create a subdirectory of opsworks_cookbooks named ec2_keys and copy the key pair's private key (.pem) file to that subdirectory. Note that putting the private key in ec2_keys is just a convenience that simplifies the code a bit; it can be anywhere on your system.

4. Create a subdirectory of opsworks_cookbooks named createdir-ec2 and navigate to it.

5. Add a metadata.rb file to createdir-ec2 with the following content.

   
   name "createdir-ec2"
   version "0.1.0"

6. Initialize Test Kitchen, as described in Example 1: Installing Packages. The following section describes how to configure .kitchen.yml, which is significantly more complicated for Amazon EC2 instances.

7. Add a recipes subdirectory to createdir-ec2.

To run the recipe

1. Create a file named default.rb with the following code and save it to the cookbook's recipes folder.

   
   directory "/srv/www/shared" do
     mode 0755
     owner 'root'
     group 'root'
     recursive true
     action :create
   end

2. Run kitchen converge to execute the recipe. Note that this command will take longer to complete than the previous examples because of the time required to launch and initialize an Amazon EC2 instance.

3. Go to the Amazon EC2 console, select the US West (N. California)) region, and click Instances in the navigation pane. You will see the newly created instance in the list.

4. Run kitchen login to log in to the instance, just as you have been doing for instances running in VirtualBox. You will see the newly created directories under /srv. You can also use your favorite SSH client to connect to the instance.