Getting Started with AWS Educate

This guide is meant for IN4.0 Talent Academy cohort to access their AWS Educate account and launch an Amazon Linux 2 based EC2 instance for the classwork related to hosting a website, exploring AWS services and preparing for the AWS certifications.

Table of contents

  1. Check your email alias
  2. Signing up for AWS Educate account
  3. Accessing AWS Console using AWS Educate
  4. Launching an EC2 Instance (Virtual Computer)
  5. Connecting to the EC2 Instance via Termius

0. Check your email alias

By default, you should be having access to an username@academy.in40.co.uk email account. With this Microsoft Exchange email account, you should be able to send and receive emails using https://outlook.office.com or any of your email clients.

This email account of yours has also been configured to have an alias username@iot.atria.edu to let you have access to certain student benefits such as AWS Educate, Github Student Developer Pack, etc. This means if someone sends an email to username@iot.atria.edu, you will receive that email at username@academy.in40.co.uk. (Yes ofcourse, the username has to be the same)

Check this out by sending an email to your email alias and see if you have received it.

Example: Let’s assume your primary email account is tom@academy.in40.co.uk. Send an email to tom@iot.atria.edu from any of your email accounts and see if you received that email at tom@academy.in40.co.uk

Don’t proceed further if this didn’t work for you and intimate your instructor.

1. Signing up for AWS Educate account

You have been added to an AWS Educate classrom that allows you to have $50 AWS credits towards that classroom in addition to the $30 AWS credits towards the AWS Educate’s starter account.

Check your email where you should have received an email from support@awseducate.com

Click on the link it has and follow through the application process. It should take you to an application form looking like this

Fill the fields as suggested below

  • School or Institution Name: Atria Institute of Technology
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • First Name: Your First Name
  • Last Name: Your Last Name
  • Email: username@iot.atria.edu
  • Graduation Month: 06
  • Graduation Year: 2021
  • Birth Month: Your birth month
  • Birth Year: Your birth year
  • Promo Code: blank

Check the I’m not a robot field and prove the same and click Next

In the next page, scroll through the Terms and Conditions till the end, select I agree and click Submit

After you submit, you should receive an email from support@awseducate.com asking you to confirm your email and the application

Click on the verification link in the email and your application for AWS Educate gets completed here.

In a few minutes, you should receive another email approving your application to the AWS Educate.

Feel free to click on the given link and setup a password of your choice

To access your AWS Educate account, go to https://www.awseducate.com (and click on Sign in to AWS Educate) or go to https://www.awseducate.com/signin/SiteLogin

Fill your AWS Educate account credentials and click Sign In

2. Accessing AWS Console using AWS Educate

Once you sign in, you will see a number of options to

  • Learn through Career Pathways and Digital Badges
  • Build you portfolio
  • Find and apply for jobs from AWS Educate partner companies
  • Access your AWS account

We are interested in getting access to the AWS console, so click on the AWS account link in the menubar and it will take you to this page

Click on the AWS Educate Starter Account

This will open a new tab in your browser and take you to the Workbench maintained by Vocareum platform to allow you to access the AWS account

This page shows your AWS Account Status for the Starter Account. If you are enrolled into a class by your instructor, you should be able to see more classes when you click the down arrow next to My Classes link on the menu bar

Click on Intro to Coud Computing in this case to access the AWS account with higher credits

As you make use of AWS services from these accounts, the remaining credits will decrease. You can find the cost of running AWS services from https://aws.amazon.com

Note: The session time denotes the time until which the AWS account will be logged into the current browser. After the session time, you would be automatically logged out from the AWS account. However, any service that you created or started during this session will keep running until you run out of credits.

Click on the AWS Console button and a new tab will open with your AWS account. Make sure you have unblocked popups or click on the popup notification in your URL bar manually if you see no action after clicking on the AWS Console button.

3. Launching an EC2 Instance (Virtual Computer)

On the top left of your AWS console, go to Services and click on the EC2 link under Compute section. This will take you to the EC2 Dashboard where you find the EC2 resources configured in your account for the selected region

Click on Launch Instance to select the Amazon Machine Image (AMI). We shall use Amazon Linux 2 operating system throughout this program, so select the same

You will now be prompted to select the Instance Type. t2.micro comes for free (750hours/account) and it’s technical specification is good enough for a beginner level web server so select t2.micro

Click Review and Launch. This will take you to a page where you can review all the different configurations such as

  • Storage Type and capacity
  • Security group
  • Tags

We will stick with the defaults. Click Launch

You will now be prompted to select the key pair required to access the EC2 Instance you are about to create. Select the Create a new key pair option from the drop-down menu and enter a name for key pair. The key pair acts as a secure password for you to login to your EC2 Instance / Virtual Machine.

Download the key pair. Notice the extension of the file once it is downloaded. We will refer to this file as the *.pem file henceforth since this file has a .pem extension.

Once you download the key pair file, click on Launch Instances. This should take you to the following page

Click on the View Instances button to look at the EC2 instance that is being provisioned for you. In a couple of minutes you should be able to see the status of this instance converting from pending to running

You should have a screen looking as follows (ignore my terminated instance). When you click on the checkbox or the Instance ID of the running instance you should be able to see all the instance details on the lower half of the screen

The Instance description section gives you most of the information about the EC2 instance you have selected. One of the things to be noted here is

  • IPv4 Public IP: This is the IP address / Hostname you shall use while connecting to this instance via SSH

In order to connect to this instance, the other information you require are:

  • Username: ec2-user
  • Port: 22
  • Key Pair: the *.pem file you downloaded while launching the instance

4. Connecting to the EC2 Instance via Termius

Download and Install the Termius software from https://termius.com for your operating system

Once the installation is complete, launch the Termius application and you should see the Termius window as follows (by skipping the Sign Up)

Click on +New Host and configure the following

  • In the Label field, enter a name you would like to refer the EC2 instance with
  • In the Address field, enter the IPv4 Public IP you noted in the AWS Console – Instance description
  • In the Username field, enter the Username of the EC2 instance (i.e., ec2-user)
  • In the Password field, click on Keys, then click +KEY, then click File and navigate to the directory where you downloaded the *.pem, select it and click Open. Then click SAVE, followed by SAVE again

This should display the Host you just configured and saved.

Now double click on the Host you just added and it should prompt you to confirm the fingerprint. This is a method of confirming your connection to a new computer over SSH.

Click YES to proceed

Now you should successfully be able to get access to the Terminal / Shell / Console of your EC2 instance

Well done! You can now focus on the Application development and Server management henceforth.

Last modified: October 4, 2020