Lab 1-1

Access

Academy access

After registering for an account via the invitation email(s), access AWS Academy via this account at awsacademy.instructure.com.

Lab access

From the AWS Academy Cloud Foundations lab, select Modules → Sandbox Environment, and open the sandbox. From the resultant lab page, select Start Lab in the top right. This may take a few minutes.

Once the sandbox/lab has been started, the AWS CLI will be available in the bash window within the sandbox. To access the AWS console associated with the sandbox, select AWS in the top right.

EC2 instance

Creation

An EC2 instance was created within the sandbox AWS console, with the following (default) settings:

• Image: Amazon Linux
• Size: t2.micro (free)
• SSH Key: vockey
• New Security Group
  • Allow SSH for anywhere

SSH access

To access the SSH key already associated with the EC2 instance created above, open the lab page (accessed via Sandbox Environment), and select Details → AWS: Show from the top right. From the resultant window, Download PEM from the SSH Key section.

Info

The PPK from the credentials popup is used with PuTTY, whereas the PEM is used with Linux, PowerShell SSH, etc.

Open a terminal, and be sure to set the proper permissions (400) on the private key, if not accessing from a Windows host.

From the AWS console, select EC2 and choose Instances. To get the details of an interface, select it (via the checkbox), after which a Details pane should open below the list of instances.

From the instance details, copy the public IP address of the instance. Use it, along with the following template, to connect to the instance via SSH:

ssh -i /path/to/labsuser.pem ec2-user@<public-IP>

Warning

Once the lab is complete, ending the lab from the sandbox environment lab page will remove any resources created from the sandbox AWS console. This is in contrast to the learner lab, in which resources persist.