Chapter 5: Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

5.3 How to launch an EC2 instance (console, step by step)

By Ravindra Bagale · Last updated: 25 September 2026

Chala, aata actual launch karuya. Open the console and do every step along with me. Before you start: sign in to the AWS Management Console, and select the Mumbai (ap-south-1) region from the top-right region menu.

Step 1 — Open EC2. Search "EC2" in the top search bar → EC2 Dashboard → Launch instance.

Step 2 — Name and tags. Name: web-server-1. (This creates a tag Name=web-server-1.)

Step 3 — Choose an AMI. Under Application and OS Images choose one of:

• Amazon Linux 2023 AMI (default, free-tier eligible) — user ec2-user
• Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS (or 22.04 LTS) — user ubuntu
• CentOS Stream 9 — search Browse more AMIs → AWS Marketplace / Community AMIs for the official "CentOS Stream 9" image — user ec2-user (older CentOS images used centos)

Keep architecture 64-bit (x86) unless you chose a Graviton type.

Step 4 — Instance type. Choose a free-tier eligible type such as t3.micro or t2.micro (label shown in the list).

Step 5 — Key pair (login). Click Create new key pair → name mykey → type RSA or ED25519 → format .pem (for OpenSSH on Linux/Mac/Windows 10+) or .ppk (for PuTTY) → Create. The file downloads only once — keep it safe.

Step 6 — Network settings. Click Edit:

• VPC: default VPC; Subnet: No preference (or pick an AZ)
• Auto-assign public IP: Enable
• Firewall (security groups): Create security group, name web-sg, with inbound rules:

Step 7 — Configure storage. Default root volume 8 GiB gp3 (Ubuntu defaults to 8 GiB; you can set up to 30 GiB within typical free-tier storage limits).

Step 8 — Advanced details (optional). Paste a User data script to auto-install a web server at first boot, for example on Amazon Linux 2023:

#!/bin/bash
yum install -y nginx
echo "<h1>Hello from $(hostname -f)</h1>" > /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html
service nginx start
systemctl enable nginx

Step 9 — Launch. Review the Summary panel → Launch instance → View all instances. Wait until Instance state = Running and Status checks = 2/2 checks passed. Copy the Public IPv4 address.

Step 10 — Test. If you used the user-data script, open http://<PUBLIC_IP> in a browser (note: http, not https).