We're going to do all of this in us-east-1 with the AWS Linux AMI. If you wish to do this in a different region you'll simply need to provide a different AMI ID to the template we're going to create.

Let's get in to it; you'll need the following:

• The VPC ID of your default VPC in us-east-1. You don't have to use the default VPC, you'll just need to make sure you choose a VPC which has a public subnet (which is configured to assign public IP addresses)
• The subnet ID of the public subnet
• An SSH key pair configured in us-east-1
• An e-mail address we can send alerts to