3 Ways To Launch An Amazon EC2 Instance

Launching EC2 Instances On-Demand Using The AWS Management Console, AWS CLI and AWS SDK

5 min readNov 1, 2020

If you are new to Amazon Web Services, this simple guide will be a great tool to help you learn how to launch EC2 instances into the cloud. EC2 instances are probably one of the most common and most used services in the AWS Cloud. EC2 instances are virtual machines and servers which customers can easily request and provision in the cloud.

There are many OS that can be used, such as Ubuntu, Windows, Linux and more. Instances also come in many types, with differing prices, compute power, RAM, processors and other options in order to best suit your needs.

You can use EC2 instances to host websites, web applications, applications, services and pretty much anything that needs computing power. Here, I will cover 3 ways to easily and quickly launch EC2 instances into the cloud.

AWS Management Console

The AWS Management Console provides a web-based GUI for you to easily build and add your cloud services easily. This is one of the most common and easiest ways to launch an EC2 instance, due to a GUI being provided for your use.

Click on “Services” in the top left corner and click “EC2”.

Select “Instances” in the left bar and click “Launch an Instance” on the right side of the screen.

For the next steps, fill in the following information for this example and click next as required.

Choose an AMI: Amazon Linux 2
Instance Type: t2.micro
Instance Details: Click Next
Storage: Click Next
Tags: Click Next
Security Group: Click Review + Launch

At this point, you should see the review screen as seen below. You may ignore the warning for now. Click “Launch”.

Choose “Proceed without a key pair” for this example and tick the box to acknowledge. Click “Launch Instances”.

You will see that your instances are now launching. Click View instances to go back to the Instances tab. Give the instance some time to boot.

You should now see that an EC2 instance is running and initializing status checks. When the status check completes and shows “2/2 checks passed” as seen below, you can start using the instance.

Status Checks Passed and Instance is ready to use

When you click on the check box on the left of the instance, you can see information about the instance you just launched. This includes Public IP, networking information, status checks, tags, monitoring details and more.

Congratulations, you have launched your EC2 instance using the AWS Management Console!

AWS CLI (Command Line Interface)

If you prefer typing into a terminal instead of using a GUI, you can choose to use the AWS CLI. AWS CLI is actually preferred for running scripts and launching multiple EC2 instances easily without having to go through the setup wizard on the Management Console multiple times. However, you do need to have AWS CLI configured and set up. If you haven’t done that, you can refer to my guide here.

If you do already have AWS CLI installed and configured, you are ready to go! It is a much shorter process of launching an EC2 instance using AWS CLI compared to the AWS Management Console, especially if you are launching multiple instances.

To launch instances using AWS CLI, you require certain information, such as ami-id you wish to use, the sg-id security group id you want to use, and the subnetid that you are launching the EC2 instance into. You can get this information from the AWS Management Console or with other AWS CLI commands.

For example, I will use the following information:

ami-id: ami-0d9dacead6e617656 (Ubuntu image by AWS)
sg-id: sg-0d369779 (My default security group id)
subnet-id: subnet-4119cd27 (Default subnet in ap-southeast-1b)

There command and output we will get is:

$ aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-0d9dacead6e617656 --count 1 --instance-type t2.micro --security-group-ids sg-0d369779 --subnet-id subnet-4119cd27{
    "Groups": [],
    "Instances": [
        {
            "AmiLaunchIndex": 0,
            "ImageId": "ami-0d9dacead6e617656",
            "InstanceId": "i-0acf8df8cc372a6f5",
            "InstanceType": "t2.micro",
            "LaunchTime": "2020-11-01T10:48:10+00:00",
            "Monitoring": {
                "State": "disabled"
            },
            "Placement": {
                "AvailabilityZone": "ap-southeast-1b",
                "GroupName": "",
                "Tenancy": "default"
            },
   ..........
}

As you can see, it shows up on my AWS Management Console as well, confirming that the launch was successful:

Using AWS SDK

AWS provides many SDKs for the various programming languages for you to manage and access your AWS resources. Supported languages include Python, Ruby, Javascript and many more. For this tutorial, I will only be covering AWS SDK for python, but you can we whichever is your preferred language.

If you don’t have python installed, you can download it here. After installing python, you need to install boto3, which is the AWS SDK for Python. Run pip install boto3 to quickly install it.

Once all that is set up, we can use this Python script to launch an EC2 instance:

import boto3ec2 = boto3.resource('ec2')# create a new EC2 instanceinstances = ec2.create_instances(ImageId='ami-0d9dacead6e617656',MinCount=1,MaxCount=1,InstanceType='t2.micro')

Conclusion

AWS provides many different ways to help you easily launch EC2 instances in the cloud regardless of your requirement. Need to quickly launch 1 instance for testing? I would use the AWS Management Console. However, AWS CLI and AWS SDK would be preferred for batch launches and automation scripts.

That is just my preference, use whatever is best for you!

The above examples are just very quick tutorials on how to launch EC2 instances in different ways, there are more parameters and factors that you can add as well, based on your needs. For example, you could use user data scripts or the keypair parameter for AWS CLI or AWS SDK.

Happy building!