Port 5480: Getting started with AWS EC2

Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) offers web-scale computing that allows you to increase your compute capacity in a manner of minutes. This is done through the deployment of a base instance. An instance is a virtual machine in AWS speak. AWS has many instances available which come in different sizes to best suits your need. An in-depth overview can be found here.

The AWS free tier allows you 750 hours of use for one of their micro instances. These come in several Windows or Linux flavours. The t1.micro instance offers you one vCPU and 0.613 MB of RAM while storage is provided via EBS. This will do just fine for this exercise...

Log into the AWS console and go to EC2 Service. Select Key Pairs under Network & Security.
Create Key Pair and specify name. Click create button

The key pair is generated and a .pem file is downloaded to your workstation. This is your private key
Go to the instances menu on the left and click Launch Instance.
In step 1, pick one of the instances that are eligble for free tier.
Click Select. On step 2, ensure your micro instance is selected and click "Next:Configure Instance Details" button
In step 3, you can keep defaults and move on to the storage configuration
In step 4, you can keep defaults
In step 5, you can specify a tag which allows you to identify your server
In step 6 you will need to specify a security group. A security group is basically one or more firewall rules. Since this is a web server I want HTTP access. I also opened access to RDP and SQL.
Please note that this configuration is wide open!! You want to secure this to match your needs.
In step 7, you can review your settings before clicking the launch button. You will be asked to select the key pair before instance is launched.
Go to your instances and select the instance you have just created. Click the connect button.
Download the Remote Desktop File and click the Get Password button.
Upload your .pem file and decrypt password. You will need this password to access your windows instance via RDP.
You should now be able to RDP into your instance with the password provided. Nothing is stopping you from changing the password to something that fits in with your password policy.