Day-3 | EC2 Deep Dive | Deploy Jenkins on AWS | Available in 1080P Quality | Project | #aws #devops

Short summary

EC2 deep dive + hands-on Jenkins deployment from the “AWS Zero to Hero” series (presenter: Abhishek). Covers EC2 core concepts, when to use EC2, regions/AZs, networking basics, and a practical step-by-step to launch an EC2 instance and install Jenkins.

Key concepts (theory)

What is EC2?

• EC2 = Elastic Compute Cloud.
  • Compute: virtual servers (CPU, RAM, disk) provided via hypervisor/virtualization.
  • Cloud: AWS hosts and manages the underlying datacenter infrastructure.
  • Elastic: resources can scale up/down. AWS uses “Elastic” in other services too (e.g., ELB, EKS).

Why use EC2 instead of self-hosted servers?

• Offloads maintenance, patching and large-scale virtualization to AWS.
• Pay-as-you-go model — you can stop or terminate instances when not needed to save cost.

EC2 instance families (overview)

• General purpose
• Compute-optimized
• Memory-optimized
• Storage-optimized
• Accelerated compute Choose an instance family based on workload (e.g., compute-optimized for ML/gaming; memory/storage-optimized for big-data or HPC).

Regions and Availability Zones (AZs)

• Regions: geographically separate AWS datacenters (choose for latency, data residency and compliance).
• AZs: multiple independent locations within a region to enable fault tolerance and high availability.

Networking basics

• Public vs. private IP addresses.
• VPC and subnets.
• Security groups: inbound/outbound rules controlling traffic to instances.

Practical guide — Create EC2 and deploy Jenkins

Follow these high-level steps to launch an EC2 instance and install Jenkins.

1. Launch instance from AWS Console

   • Go to EC2 → Launch Instance.
   • Name the instance and choose an AMI/OS (pick a free-tier-eligible AMI if applicable).
   • Choose an instance type. Free-tier example: t2.micro (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM; free-tier limit: 750 hours/month).

2. Create and download a key pair

   • Save the .pem file securely. Do not share the private key.

3. Connect to the instance

   • On Linux/macOS set permissions and SSH:
     • chmod 600 AWS_login.pem
     • ssh -i AWS_login.pem ubuntu@<public-ip>
   • On Windows use PuTTY (convert .pem to .ppk) or MobaXterm.

4. Wait until instance state is running and get the public IP to access it externally.

5. Inside the instance

   • Update packages:
     • sudo apt update
   • Install Java (Jenkins prerequisite):
     • sudo apt install openjdk-11-jdk

6. Install Jenkins

   • Follow the official Jenkins repository installation steps for Ubuntu.
   • Start/verify the service:
     • sudo systemctl status jenkins
   • Jenkins default port: 8080.

7. Adjust security group rules

   • Add an inbound rule to allow TCP port 8080 (and ensure SSH port 22 is open only for your IP).
   • Avoid using overly permissive rules like 0.0.0.0/0 unless necessary.

8. Access Jenkins

   • Open in browser: http://<public-ip>:8080
   • Use the initial admin password from:
     • /var/lib/jenkins/secrets/initialAdminPassword

9. Clean up

   • Stop or terminate instances after use to avoid ongoing charges.

Commands / operations (examples)

• chmod 600 AWS_login.pem
• ssh -i AWS_login.pem ubuntu@<public-ip>
• sudo apt update
• sudo apt install openjdk-11-jdk
• sudo systemctl status jenkins

Security & cost notes

• Free tier: t2.micro free for up to 750 hours/month (roughly one instance running continuously for a month).
• Keep private keys secure and never share them.
• Limit inbound access via security groups rather than allowing wide-open access.
• Stop or terminate test instances when finished to prevent unexpected charges.
• Different instance families have different pricing (memory-optimized instances are typically more expensive than general purpose).

Tip: Always double-check security group rules and billing dashboard after experiments.

Tools & references

• AWS Management Console (EC2 dashboard)
• Jenkins official installation docs (Ubuntu)
• SSH clients: macOS Terminal, PuTTY (Windows), MobaXterm
• Related Linux & DevOps course videos for background material

Future topics in the series

• Security groups: inbound/outbound rules, route tables, VPC/subnets
• Elastic IPs, snapshots
• Load balancing, high availability, and data replication

Presenter / sources

• Presenter: Abhishek (AWS Zero to Hero series)
• Main platforms/tools referenced: AWS (EC2), Jenkins, Linux/Ubuntu, PuTTY/MobaXterm