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EC in EC2 stands for elastic computing, and the short answer is bringing up a virtual in the cloud. Amazon AWS has a collection of all the popular OS images already available and all you need to do is select the one you need for requirement, followed by the hardware requirement. Based on your OS and the hardware configuration you selected, AWS will provision that hardware and install that OS. You can select the type of storage you want, traditional or SSD, and then attach/de-attach the hard drive based on your requirement. Best of all, you only pay for the time you want to use it, and when you stop the EC2 machine, AWS will free up those resources and add them back its stock, that's how flexible AWS is. Now, it's time for a quick recap of what we did in this recipe. As a prerequisite, you need to first create an amazon AWS account, which is very easy to create. Then, step 1 shows you how to select EC2. Steps 2 and 3 show how to search and select Kali Linux's minimal image. In step 4, you get to read everything that Kali Linux AMI has to offer, the basic requirements and the user login information. Step 5 shows you how to select an instance type depending on your requirement and budget. In steps 6 to 7 you will go through the simple wizard while choosing the default recommended SSD to boot from. Step 8 shows you the final page with warnings and points you should take care of or be aware of. In step 9, you choose to set up a security group on SSH protocol port 22 only to allow you from a specific IP range that belongs to you. In step 10, you are shown the review page, where based on your instance type selection it informs you whether you are eligible for free tier or not. In step 11, you create a new SSH Key pair and download it on your local machine. In step 12, you finally click on launch to start the instance.

Having Kali Linux installed in Amazon AWS infrastructure with a public IP address, with just few clicks, can prove to be very helpful during external penetration testing. As you know, we have selected and installed Kali Linux's minimal image for use in AWS infrastructure, due to which our installation does not have any tools installed by default.

In our next recipe, we will cover how to use SSH and setup Kali Linux on Amazon AWS box for use. In this recipe, we will also solve few problems that you might face while updating the repository and installing Kali Linux tools and setting up GUI and installing all the required tools we will need for use.