The environment

AWS Setup

  • Create a free tier AWS account.

Nearly all the examples on this website will use the US-EAST-1 region

  • Get the Centos Amazon Machine Image (AMI) id

Subscribe to the Centos Community.

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace

Select “Operating Systems”

Select “CentOS.org”

Select the “Centos 7 (x86_64) – with Updates HVM” image

On the following page select “Continue to Subscribe”

On the following page select “Continue to Configuration”

On the following page note the Ami ID, currently “ami-9887c6e7”

At this point we can exit as we have the AMI Id.

There are many other ways to get this ID but I wanted to be absolutely sure I was downloading an image that could not have been amended by anyone.

VirtualBox

This section is not necessary as long as you are happy to do all your work on windows and AWS.

I will use the Centos VM in virtualbox to perform my editing, manage Git, Terraform, Chef and Docker so that I am as close as possible to mirroring my professional environment.

The full instructions for the setup are included in a later post.

Download and install Oracle VM Virtualbox from  https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Download the centos DVD ISO from https://www.centos.org/

Create a Centos VM in virtualbox.

Local Software

To build and test the systems we will need the following installed.

Windows Only

Download and install Putty, PuTTYgen and Pageant from https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

For windows or Linux

I am installing on the Centos linux VM but this software can be installed on Windows

Windows

Terraform – https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html

Git – https://git-scm.com/downloads or

Github – https://desktop.github.com/

Chef Workstation -https://downloads.chef.io/chef-workstation/

Docker Desktop – https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop

Linux

The Chef and Docker installations are described in subsequent posts