Amazon EC2: launch an instance, networking and pricing models

Baobab Market's showcase website runs on S3, but the real shop needs a server: a machine that runs a program on every visit. Two years ago, it would have cost 2 million CFA francs and six weeks of waiting. Today, Awa asks you to launch it this morning, make it reachable, be able to log into it without leaving a password lying around, and know what it costs. This third lab of the preparation path for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification starts with what the exam asks about EC2 most often: reading an instance type, choosing a family, and what remains your responsibility in the shared responsibility model. Then you read the instance's network architecture on a diagram: Region, VPC, Availability Zones, public and private subnets, Internet gateway, security group and network ACL. You then launch the instance, after a first denial triggered on purpose, with an IAM role and a startup script that installs a web server. The website does not respond: you open exactly the port needed in the security group, and the shop appears. You open a shell on the instance through Session Manager, with no SSH key and no administration port, find its EBS disk there, then stop and restart it to watch its public address change. The lab ends on pricing models: On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Spot and Dedicated Hosts. Everything happens in the real AWS console, on a real instance. The guide is illustrated with screenshots of the console and an architecture diagram, explains what the exam expects from each chapter, and ends with a ten-question practice exam.