Listed are some benefits to using AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud.

• You can install a server in minutes and not days. (Our Windows 2012 Server should take 10-20 minutes to setup).
• Your server is automatically licensed and you don’t have to purchase a license for the Windows Server Software.
• You can setup your server locally to your market, so if your in New York you can setup a server in the East Coast reducing latency for all your users.

Step 1. –  You must have a AWS account, so if you don’t have an account head over to https://aws.amazon.com/ and create/login to your account.

Step: 1a. – You should create a new account or sign-in with your Amazon id/pw if you already have an account.  Be sure that this account is one that can be used by other members of your organization.

 Step 2. – Here you should select EC2 and notice you can change what region your server will be setup, there by reducing the latency your users will experience once they connect to your server.

Step 3. –  EC2 simply means stand for Elastic Cloud Compute, this is where you will spin-up the virtual server and which makes setting up new servers fast and very efficient.  As you will notice there are many other options in the dashboard which we won’t deal with today.

Step 4. – Listed in our account we should see all the running instances, volumes etc.  Here you can see I already have another instance installed, volume and key pair, plus 2 security groups setup.

Step 5 – Now we get to choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), for our installation we’ll be using ami-478d782c
(Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Base).

Step 6 – Our next step allows us to choose the instance type, simply choosing the specs for our server ie: Memory, CPU, Storage which we’ll need to consider so we have the right setup for our application and enough resources to handle the load.

Here we chose the t2.micro  (free tier eligible for 1 year).

Step 7. – Configuring our instance details, we set the IP address, subnet, Domain etc.  Many common settings when setting up a server in a Domain Environment.  You should already have a working knowledge of the domain you would like to configure.

Step 8. – You will need to provide disk storage, so select how many GB you’ll need for server setup and backup drives etc.

Step 9. – A very important step where you will need to setup a security group.  The security group allows who or what can access your server.  You can set the IP’s allowed to access your server and block various ip’s and ports on the server. Take a moment and set your security policy and apply to your server.

Step 10. – Take a moment to review your server settings, make any changes as needed for finalizing the server.

Step 12. – This step is very important as this is where you will set the password for your admin account.

Step 13 – At this stage your instance is almost ready to be launched, you will have to wait for the setup to complete.

Step 14. – Final Step is now to launch your instance, just wait for the setup to complete and use your id/pw to use remote desktop into your server.

Now you have your Windows 2012 Server Setup, configured now you can login into your server and begin deploying apps, setup hosting or whatever your plans are for your new server instance.

Resources:

• Getting Started with AWS videos steps.
• AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.

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