Building a free develop enviroment at EC2 - Introduction

Amazon gives us the possibility of building a free develop enviroment. What does that means? They offer for us alone, a self-managed virtual server, or a hosting, for whom thinks i'm speaking double-Dutch. Resources are some limited, but never look a gift horse in the mouth! :)

That means we can save our time and increase our efficiency. You do not have to install a WAMP server on your local machine, and configure any software. Even with only a little knowledge of Linux commands, we will succeed in connecting throught SSH or FTP. Furthermore, Amazon does provide a framework on which you can build an application that will easily scale, but with care, or we will have to pay. But don't worry: they offers you track any charges. Amazon CloudWatch enables monitoring your estimated charges as well as allows you to set billing alerts for specified amounts, even 1$.

As the issue is a vast subject, thus, the first thing i'm going to do is to divide it in sections:

• 1) How to build my first (free) micro instance?
• 2) How to configure the FTP server? How to connect throught SSH with this micro instance?
• 3) How to track any charges? How to set billing alerts?
• 4) Introduction to CloudFormation Stacks, - to put it in plain language - preconfigured environments (LAMP width Wordpress, os Drupal, etc.)
• 5) How to install PHP, MySQL, phpmyadmin, node.js, etc. on our own?
• 6) How to launch a RDS Database Instance? How to connect with it from our micro instance?
• 7) How to install a continous integration system on our own? Git, SVN, Jenkins, etc.
• 8) How to connect with external repositories? BitBucket, GitHub, etc.
• 9) Hoy to connect with online IDE like Cloud9?

All these issues, will be written in subsequent post. Hope this helps you!