Creating an AWS account

As mentioned in the previous section, a VPC within AWS represents a high-level abstraction of your overall network. All of the resources that we create will run inside a VPC. Therefore, we’ll need to create a VPC first before we can create an EC2 instance and deploy Ubuntu.

Before we can create a VPC though, we’ll need an AWS account. Before this chapter, I typically advised you to use whatever hardware you have available in order to create Ubuntu installations to work with the platform. This time, we’re going to utilize an actual cloud provider, which comes at a cost. While there are free components available for a limited time with a new account, it’s up to you, the reader, to keep track of billing. We’ll discuss costs in greater detail later in this chapter. But as a general rule of thumb for now, always use whatever the cheapest option is. If a free instance type is available, go with that. Of course, if you’...