In the earlier few recipes, we saw how to start MongoDB in the cloud using a hosted service provided by MongoLab, which gave an alternative to set up MongoDB on all leading cloud vendors. However, if we plan to host and monitor the instance ourselves for greater control or set up within our own virtual private cloud, we can do it ourselves. Though the procedure varies from cloud provider to cloud provider, we will demonstrate it using AWS. There are a couple of ways to do this, but in this recipe, we will do it using the Amazon Machine Image (AMI). The AMI is a template that contains details such as the operating system and the software that will be available on the started virtual machine. All this information will be used while booting up a new virtual machine instance on the cloud. To know more about the AMI, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Machine_Image.

Talking about AWS, Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) is a service that lets...