This is step 1 of 6 of Hands-On Project 2 for Amazon Web Services. In this step, you prepare a virtual machine that is suitable to be a development computer in the cloud.
New VM, or Upgrade?
Later in this project, we will be installing and running a graphical desktop (Ubuntu Desktop) on our cloud personal computer. Very small instances (like t2.micro, which exists on the Free tier) do not have enough CPU and memory to effectively run a desktop UI. To get a VM that will actually work, you can either provision a brand new EC2 instance that has enough power, or upgrade one of your existing instances by changing the EC2 instance type.
The trade-off is straightforward: If you can spare an existing VM, it is certainly easier to change the instance type. That way, you take advantage of your key pair work, software installations, etc. If you continue to have a separate need for all your existing VMs and/or the software installed on the ones you have is incompatible with having a desktop UI and development software, then you’ll need to create a brand new instance.
New Virtual Machine
If you need a new VM, follow the process of VM setup, including SSH key pairs, etc. For this project, you will want to select an instance type with at least 2 CPUs and 4GB of memory. t2.medium has worked well for this purpose and is still fairly inexpensive.
Change the EC2 Instance Type
If you have a VM you can spare, changing the instance type is simple and efficient. Here is a 2-minute video showing the process:
To prepare your VM for this project, change your EC2 instance size to t2.medium, which has 2 CPUs and 4GB memory:
- From the Management Console, please complete the following:
- Navigate: Console Home –> EC2 –> Instances.
- Select the EC2 instance that you would like to change, then Choose Instance State –> Stop Instance. Wait for the Instance State to change to Stopped.
- With the instance still selected, select Actions –> Instance Settings –> Change instance type.
- Select instance type t2.medium and click Apply. Notice that this page does not display details about the instance types that you can select. You need to know in advance which new instance type you want based on CPUs, memory, etc.
- Select the instance again if necessary, then select Instance State –> Start instance to restart the instance.
- Afterwards, to verify that the change was as intended, connect to the updated instance with SSH and run lscpu (to check the number of CPUs) and free -h –si (to check the amount of installed memory).