The main goal of this chapter is to create a simple Hello World web application. Since we are starting off with a vanilla OS, we need to connect to the host to make the necessary changes to turn our standard server into a web server. In order to ssh our instance, we need to find the DNS name of our running instance, as follows:

$ aws ec2 describe-instances 
  --instance-ids i-97000624 
  --query "Reservations[*].Instances[*].PublicDnsName"
[
  [
    "ec2-54-88-134-38.compute-1.amazonaws.com"
  ]
]  

We now have the public DNS name of our instance and the private key to ssh into our instance. The last thing to know is that in Amazon Linux for the OS that we selected when we chose our AMI, the default user account is called ec2-user:

$ ssh -i ~/.ssh/EffectiveDevOpsAWS.pem [email protected]
    
           __|  __|_  )
           _|  (     /   Amazon Linux AMI
          ___|\___|___|
    
[ec2-user@ip-172-31-22-234 ~]$  

If you experience any sort of issue, add the -vvv option in your ssh command to troubleshoot it.