Book Image

Designing AWS Environments

By : Mitesh Soni, Wayde Gilchrist
Book Image

Designing AWS Environments

By: Mitesh Soni, Wayde Gilchrist

Overview of this book

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides trusted,cloud-based solutions to help you meet your business needs. Running your solutions in the AWS Cloud can help you get your applications up and running faster while providing the security to meet your compliance requirements. This book begins by familiarizing you with the key capabilities to architect and host applications, websites, and services on AWS. We explain the available options for AWS free tier with virtual instances and demonstrate how you can launch and connect them. Using practical examples, you’ll be able to design and deploy networking and hosting solutions for large deployments. Finally, the book focuses on security and important elements of scalability and high availability using AWS VPC, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto scaling. By the end of this book, you will have handson experience of working with AWS instances,VPC, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto scalingrelated tasks on Amazon Web Services.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Logging in to Windows instances


In the previous section, we saw how to connect to Linux instances using a private key for authentication. In this section, we're going to see how the process works for Windows instances.

For Windows, we use the remote desktop protocol, and log in as administrator. We will obtain the administrator password, then we will log in to the instance from Windows. When AWS launches in a Windows instance, it creates a random password for the administrator user. The public key associated with the instance is used to encrypt the password. The encrypted password can only be decrypted with the private key portion of the key pair.

You can decrypt the password easily in the management console.

Go to EC2, go to Running Instances, select the instance, and under the Actions menu choose GetWindows Password.

Notice that it gives the name of the key pair that was used when the instance was launched:

In this case, it was awsbook. So, we need to select the private key.

Then, click Decrypt...