Before we startup an AMI we need to setup the security group that we will apply to the instance. Essentially we want to allow inbound traffic on 22 (ssh) and the http ports (80, 443). I like to do this on the default security group. Here's an image of the inbound tab for my default security group:
When you start our instance you will first need to select an AMI to fire up. I like ubuntu linux distributions because their package repos are pretty comprehensive.
The first step in starting an instance is to select an AMI to start switch over to the community tab and search for ami-ccf405a5 and select it. This is the 10.10 Maverick Meerkat dist and will be just fine for now. We may want to use 11.04 Natty Narwhal, but for now this ami will work just fine.
This is the step where you select the instance type, which for us will be small. We are going to be in the east region so any Availability Zone will be fine.
There are a couple more screens related to you the instance. The only thing I would do is add a tag for the instance, tag it as Redis.
Select your default key pair. I called mine ec2-keypair. This is the keypair that you created with your account and will be just fine.
Select the default security group that you setup above.
Start the instance.
ssh -i ubuntu@
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get -y upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
$ sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
$ sudo apt-get install git-core
$ sudo apt-get install nginx
Go to back to the AWS management console can create a snapshot of this fresh image.
I prefer to use chef for this step. The redis recipe implements some unix sys admin best practices. Once you are at this point let's touch base. I want to use chef to configure our servers so we can setup an account with ops code. I'll walk you through this. We will also need to setup ngnix as a reverse proxy.