Lab Setup

Setup - Managed Instances

We will need to have a couple instances deployed to work with throughout the workshop. This will be provided to the participants as homework ahead of the day or the workshop to ensure we have enough time to get through the material.

Create an IAM Role and Instance Profile for Systems Manager

By default, AWS Systems Manager doesn’t have permission to perform actions on your instances. You must grant access by using an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) instance profile. An instance profile is a container that passes IAM role information to an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance at launch. Servers and virtual machines (VMs) in a hybrid environment require an IAM role to communicate with the Systems Manager service. The role grants AssumeRole trust to the Systems Manager service. You only need to create the service role for a hybrid environment once for each AWS account.

  1. Create an Instance Profile for Systems Manager managed instances:
    • Navigate to the IAM console
    • In the navigation pane, select Roles.
    • Then select Create role.
    • In the Select type of trusted entity section, verify that the default AWS service is selected.
    • Immediately under Choose the service that will use this role, choose EC2, and then choose Next: Permissions.
  2. On the Attach permissions policies page, do the following:
    • Use the Search field to locate the AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore. Select the box next to its name.
  3. Choose Next: Tags.
  4. Choose Next: Review as we are not adding any tags to the IAM instance role.
  5. In the Review section:
    • Enter a Role name, such as SM-Workshop-ManagedInstancesRole.
      • This info will be used later on in the lab when provisioning new instances
    • Accept the default in the Role description.
    • Choose Create role.

Deploy Managed Instances

In this section we will deploy four EC2 managed instances that we will work with throughout the workshop.

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2.

  2. In the navigation pane, select Instances.

  3. Choose Launch Instance.

    • On the Step 1: Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) page, select Amazon Linux 2 AMI (HVM), SSD Volume Type.
    • On the Step 2: Choose an Instance Type page, select t2.micro, and choose Next: Configure Instance Details.
    • On the Step 3: Configure Instance Details page, perform the following steps:
      • For Number of instances, enter 4.
      • For Auto-assign Public IP, ensure auto-assign public IP is enabled.
      • For IAM Role, select the IAM role previously created, SM-Workshop-ManagedInstancesRole. This is what allows instances to be managed by Systems Manager.
      • Choose Next: Add Storage.
    • Leave the defaults and choose Next: Add Tags.
      • Do not add tags as we will create some later in the workshop.
    • Choose Next: Configure Security Group.
    • On the Step 6: Configure Security Group page, choose Select an existing security group and then select the Security Group named default with the description default VPC security group.
    • Choose Review and Launch.
    • Choose Launch.
    • Choose Proceed without a key pair from the drop-down menu and select the box for I acknowledge that I will not be able to connect to this instance unless I already know the password built into this AMI.
      • We do not need to launch our EC2 instances with key pairs as we can remotely connect later in the workshop using Session Manager.
    • Choose Launch Instances.
  4. Go back to view instances and ensure that all four EC2 instances transition to an Instance State of running.

  5. For two of the EC2 instances, add the following tags:

    • For Key, enter Name.
    • For Value, enter App1 for one instance and App2 for the other.
    • Choose Save.
  6. For the remaining two EC2 instances, add the following tags:

    • For Key, enter Name.
    • For Value, enter Web1 for one instance and Web2 for the other.
    • Choose Save.