Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious activity and unauthorized behaviour to protect your AWS accounts and workloads. You can enable it to enhance the security on your AWS account.
First log into your AWS account, then click services and search for GuardDuty.
In the next screen click Get Stated
Next Click enable GuardDuty
A video with more information can be found here:
This blog post will show you how to set up Red hat on AWS.
A full video of the process can be seen below.
Amazon AWS S3 is a file storage service on Amazon Web Services. You can also host static websites on S3 quite cheaply and easily. This guide will show you how to host a static website on Amazon s3.
Step 1
You will need to create two files on your local machine – you can download them below:
Step 2
Log into you AWS console go to S3 and click create new bucket.
Step 3
Give your bucket an unique name and click create.
Step 4
Click the checkbox beside your bucket and then click “Edit Public Access Settings”
Step 5
Leave the defaults as is and click save
Step 6
Type confirm and then click confirm
Step 7
Click into your bucket and click upload. Upload the index.html and error.html to your bucket.
Step 8
Step 9
Click Properties.
Step 10
Then click static Website Hosting
Step 11
Click:
Step 12
Click back on static website hosting
Step 13
Now click your website endpoint – you will be brought to your website.
A full video tutorial can be found here:
You can create an Amazon Machine Image or AMI for your existing EC2 instance. The AMI will allow you to launch a fresh EC2 instance using the AMI as a template. You can also share the AMI with other AWS accounts.
Step 1
To get started, it is best practise to stop your instance before you start. So right click your instance and click stop
Step 2
When the instance has stopped, right click it again, click image and then create Image
Step 3
Give your Image a name, a description and then click create Image
Step 4
In the screen that appears click the ami ID.
Step 5
You will now see your image creation as pending.
Step 6
Once the ami is marked as available you can then launch it as an EC2 instance.
A full video tutorial can be found here:
Amazon Web Services (AWS) have recently released Windows server 2019 on to AWS. This tutorial will show you how to set up windows server 2019 on AWS.
Step 1
First log into you aws account and then click Services and then EC2
Step 2
Next Click Launch Instance.
Step 3
Search for 2019 and then select the Windows Server 2019 Base.
Step 4
Select an instance size that suits your needs and then click next – Note you will be charged for larger instances.
Step 5
Click Next.
Step 6
Click Next again.
Step 7
Click Add Tag
Step 8
For Key type Name (make sure to use the a capital N) and for value enter the name you want for your instance. The Click next
Step 9
The click Review and Launch
Step 10
Click Launch
Step 11
Choose to: Create a new key pair, give you key pair a name and then download the key pair. Then click Launch instances.
Step 12
Click your instance ID
Step 13
Wait till you see an instance State of running
Step 14
Then Right click you EC2 instance and select Get Windows Password
Step 15
Browse to where you downloaded your key and then click decrypt password.
The Copy your password to the clipboard
Step 16
Note your public IP in our case:
Step 17
Open up RDP and login to your instance using the public IP, the password you copied and the username administrator.
You will now be brought to you server 2019 EC2 instance on AWS.
A full video tutorial can be found here:
A virtual private cloud (VPC) is an on-demand configurable pool of shared computing resources allocated within a public cloud environment, providing a certain level of isolation between the different organizations (denoted as users hereafter) using the resources. The isolation between one VPC user and all other users of the same cloud (other VPC users as well as other public cloud users) is achieved normally through allocation of a private IP subnet and a virtual communication construct (such as a VLAN or a set of encrypted communication channels) per user
In this tutorial we will show you how to create a VPC in AWS with a public and private subnet.
Step 1
Log into the aws console, click services and then VPC.
Step 2
Next click Elastic Ips on the left hand side
Step 3
Click to allocate new address.
Step 4
Click allocate and then close.
Step 5
Click VPC Dashboad in the upper left to go back to the VPC dashboard.
Step 6
Click launch VPC Wizard
Step 7
Click VPC with Public and Private Subnets and click select.
Step 8
Enter values relevant to you and then click create VPC
After you click create you should see the VPC creating, note, it may take several minutes for the NAT gateway to create.
You should then see a message that states the VPC is created.
A full video tutorial can be seen here:
This AWS tutorial will show you how to create a S3 bucket on AWS.
“Amazon S3 or Amazon Simple Storage Service is a “simple storage service” offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides object storage through a web service interface. Simply, Amazon S3 provides a web interface to easily store and retrieve data safely, in any amount, at any time, from anywhere, at a low cost. Amazon S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its global e-commerce network.”
Step 1
Log into you AWS account click services and then s3
Step 2
In the screen that appears click create bucket
Step 3
Give your bucket a unique name (It most be unique across all of AWS) then click Create in the lower left.
Step 4
You should now see your bucket, click it to access it.
Step 5
Click upload, to add a file.
Step 6
Click add file & navigate to a file on your machine to upload.
Step 7
Click upload to upload your file.
You should now see your file in your bucket:
A full video tutorial can be found here:
This tutorial will show you how to create a CentOS 7 instance on AWS. We assume that you already have you AWS account created and that you are logged in already.
Step 1
Click Services and then EC2
Step 2
Click Launch Instance
Step 3
Step 4
Click Continue
Step 5
Select your machine type and click Next Configure Instance details. In our case we will select the t2.micro instance as it is free tier eligible.
Step 6
Change Auto-assign public IP to Enable and click Next: Add storage.
Step 7
Leave the defaults and click Next:Add Tags
Step 8
Click Next: Configure Security Group
Step 9
Click review and Launch.
Step 10
Review your settings and then click Launch.
Step 11
In the drop down menu select create a new key pair, give the key pair a name and Download the Key Pair, then click launch Instances.
Step 12
Click your instance ID to see the instance. 
You should now see your instance.
Step 13
To connect to our instance we will need to convert the key we downloaded, to do so we will use putty and puttygen they can be downloaded form here: https://www.putty.org/
Open puttygen and click Load
Step 14
Navigate to where you downloaded your key, click all files, click on your key and click open.
Step 15
Now click Save Private key, when prompted click yes you want to save without a passphrase.
Step 16
Now open putty and enter your public IP into the host name or IP address field, then expand SSH on the left had side.
Step 17
Click auth and then browse, navigate to where you saved your key and select it.
Step 18
Now click open
Step 19
Click Yes
Step 20
Enter centos as the username and click enter.
You will now be logged in
A full video tutorial can be found here:
Say you share an AWS account with a few people and you’re the bill payer. You’d like to keep an eye on the running instances, but logging in each day to check can get tiring, especially if you are out and about and can’t get near a PC. A handy way to get the instances is to have a script running that gathers the instances and emails them to you. The below script does just that. Before you set up this script you will need set up AWS command line tools on your server. You can see how to to this in the blog post here.
#This is a bash script to get running instances from AWS and mail them on to the relevent people
printf “Hi there,\n I am a bot so please don’t reply to me all I do is list active EC2 instances in your AWS account! \n if my findings appear wrong please contact Darren In IT and he will ensure that they are corrected \n Running
Instances in EU-West-1 \n” > FileToBeMailed.txt
aws ec2 describe-instances –query ‘Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId]’ –filters Name=instance-state-name,Values=running –output text –region eu-west- 1 >> FileToBeMailed.txt
printf “\n Running Instance in us-east-1\n” >>FileToBeMailed.txt
aws ec2 describe-instances –query ‘Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId]’ –filters Name=instance-state-name,Values=running –output text –region us-east-1 >> FileToBeMailed.txt
printf “\n Running Instance in us-west-2\n” >> FileToBeMailed.txt
aws ec2 describe-instances –query ‘Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId]’ –filters Name=instance-state-name,Values=running –output text –region us-west- 2 >> FileToBeMailed.txt
printf “\n Running Instance in ap-northeast-2\n” >> FileToBeMailed.txt
aws ec2 describe-instances –query ‘Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId]’ –filters Name=instance-state-name,Values=running –output text –region ap-northeast-2 >> FileToBeMailed.txt
printf “\n Running Instance in ap-southeast-1\n” >> FileToBeMailed.txt
aws ec2 describe-instances –query ‘Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId]’ –filters Name=instance-state-name,Values=running –output text –region ap-southeast-1 >> FileToBeMailed.txt
printf “\n Running Instance in ap-southeast-2 \n” >> FileToBeMailed.txt
aws ec2 describe-instances –query ‘Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId]’ –filters Name=instance-state-name,Values=running –output text –region ap-southeast-2 >> FileToBeMailed.txt
printf “\n Running Instance in ap-northeast-1\n” >> FileToBeMailed.txt
aws ec2 describe-instances –query ‘Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId]’ –filters Name=instance-state-name,Values=running –output text –region ap-northeast-1 >> FileToBeMailed.txt
printf “\n Running Instance in eu-central-1 \n” >> FileToBeMailed.txt
aws ec2 describe-instances –query ‘Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId]’ –filters Name=instance-state-name,Values=running –output text –region eu-central-1 >> FileToBeMailed.txt
printf “\n I will mail again tomorrow with am updated list of instances” >> FileToBeMailed.txt
First we start of by typing the text we want to head our email. Here we state that we are a bot and that if there are any issues contact Darren who created the bot. The “ \n “ that you see telling the script to start a new line. We then state what will be the first region that we will get details for by writing “\n Running Instances in EU-West-1 \. Once we have finished this paragraph we direct the output to a file called FileToBeMailed.txt
Next we start by issuing our AWS commands, basically, what we are saying here is get all the running instances in eu-west-1 and then append them to the end of the FileToBeMailed.txt. We do this for each AWS region, each time appending to the end of the FileToBeMailed.txt. This builds up the list of running instances that we can see. When we have listed all the instances we print that we will mail again tomorrow with the instances.
Now that we have the file produced we just need to send the contents of this file to an email account of our choice. To do this we can use send mail and is discussed in the post here that details how to use send mail to send emails to your own account.
AWS provide command line tools that are extremely powerful. These tools allow you to administer your AWS account. The tutorial below details how you can connect a Linux machine to your AWS account. There are two portions to this tutorial:
Step 1.
Log into your AWS account.
Step 2.
Next click your user name, and in the menu that appears select “Security Credentials”.
Step 3.
In the screen that appears select “Users”.
Step 4.
Next click “Create new users”.
Step 5.
Give your account a name and insure that you have the check box ticked that states “Generate an access key for each user”. Then click “Create”.
Step 6.
In the screen that appears select “Downloads Credentials”. Be sure to take note of where the file saves to as we will need it later.
Step 7.
Click back to users and click on the user you have created.
Step 8.
Next click “Permissions” and the then “attach policy”.
Step 9.
Select the checkbox besides “Administrator Access” and click “Attach Policy”.
This completes the part of the tutorial that takes place on the AWS console. Next go to your Linux machine and open a terminal.
We will first need to install PIP which will allow use to install the AWS CLI utility.
Step 1.
Type the command “curl -O https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py” into the termainl
Step 2.
Next, type “sudo python get-pip.py” and hit the enter key.
Step 3.
Next run, “pip install awscli”
The AWS command line utility should now be installed. Now we need to configure the CLI so we can access our AWS account
Step 4.
Type “aws configure” into the termainl and press enter. You will now be promoted to enter the following information:
Enter your details from the CSV file that you saved.
You are now connected to the AWS via the command line!