Deploying our test instance

To deploy our first EC2 instance using the AMI, we need some prerequisites to be in place. They can be created using the AWS CLI inside the Cloud9 IDE.

Securing incoming traffic with security groups

AWS security best practices recommend a security-in-depth approach, where multiple levels of traffic controls allow, or reject, incoming packets. For the sake of simplicity and the scope of this chapter, we will use an instance-level security group that only allows incoming traffic originating from your local machine. Security groups are stateful, which means you don’t have to define a corresponding egress rule for packets that are allowed by certain ingress rules:

1. First, let’s see what the public IP address that is used for outgoing internet-bound traffic from your local machine is. A quick way to test this is by running a curl command on your local Terminal (not the Cloud9 IDE):

   ➜ curl ipv4.icanhazip.com95.157.36.247

2. On...