Virtualization has been around with us now for a while. But it continues to amaze me in the way that it affects the entire IT industry. It wasn't that long ago that we began to see physical servers being replaced by virtual machines at individual locations. And we still see tons of that. But what starts to happen is when you take all of this hardware, and virtualize it, companies that have a lot of money behind them can start to build up really big farms of virtual machines, and can do all kinds of really cool things that allow us to pretty much just take all this away. We don't even in many cases need to set up our own virtual machines.
We can let other people take care of that. For us. This manifests as a lot of different ways. But the first one I want to talk about is something called infrastructure as a service or IaaS. Infrastructure as a Service simply means that somebody far away will set us up a virtual infrastructure. To do bazillions of things that would normally cost us a lot of money as we brought in servers, instead of virtualization and did all the maintenance and had people who knew how to work at ease, it's craziness.
There are people out there who will, in essence rent you an entire infrastructure as a service. Let's take a look at that. Probably the best place to get started with infrastructures of service is the famous Amazon Web Services. So if you take a look here on my screen, you see it says AWS amazon.com. Now if you go ahead and click in there, now I've already created an account, we can set up an infrastructure as a service, so I'm going to go to my AWS Management Console. And this, my friends, is most people's first exposure to IAS now, Amazon Web Services is a lot more than just Infrastructure as a Service.
That's one of the small things that it does. But what we're going to be doing here is we're going to just set up a little web server. Now keep in mind what I'm saying Setting up a web server, we're going to make a virtualized web server, we're going to get it up and running. And we're going to get it on the internet with a real public IP address. And it's going to be firewalled. And everything.
Okay, so this isn't just one virtualized box. This is a complete infrastructure. Let's get started. Now, just because I know how to do it, here, we go to ec. And EC two is where we set up our infrastructure. Now, if you take a look, if you look right here, you'll see it says I have running instances, I actually already have a web server up and cooking.
So what I want to do here is we're going to go through the process. I've already done this, but we're going to do it again of actually setting up a web server from scratch. So here we go. So first of all, you click on this button right here, it says launch an instance an instance is a virtual machine as far as Amazon is concerned. So we'll launch an instance. Now take a look at all of these different types of operating systems we can install.
I mean, if you want to install Linux, if you want to install Windows, I mean, take a look here. They're all just here. You pick one. Now, I don't want to have to actually pay for this. So that you can actually do this for free. There's a lot of limitations.
So I'm going to pick a free one. So for the Linux, folks, there's plenty of those in here. And what I'm going to pick just because I like Windows is I'm going to pick Microsoft Windows Server 2012 are to base. So it's just a real basic version of Windows Server. So I'm going to select that. Now, here, I can actually start setting up some of the virtual hardware.
I can number of CPUs I want how much memory what type of storage I have, notice that it's only the most basic one that's free. You see that free tier eligible. So I'm going to stick to this because I want to use the free one. But if I wanted to spend some money, I could just click on one of these other ones. All right, now here is some of the details of how the infrastructure is going to be set up. What you're having here is a network you'll notice that it has an internal net work ID of 170 To 31 00.
And that's going to be our internal IP addresses, there will also be a virtual router, virtual switches will all be set up for us, the virtual router will have a public IP address that it can go ahead and use any way at once. so here we can add storage. And if you want it for free, you can get a 30 gigabyte it's really an SSD drive. Now, this is an interesting little option here it says Delete on termination. So basically, if I shut it down, do I just wipe it out. And there are some situations where people would want that, I would uncheck that.
But I believe that cost me money. So I'm gonna leave it checked. The next one is tag instance. Keep in mind, we're just setting up one little server here, but a lot of people use Amazon Web servers, and they have just hundreds of these virtual machines. So this tag instance is just a way for them to identify their individual instances. Next is security.
Keep in mind that we've got firewall that's given to us here. So we want to configure that firewall. Right now the way it's set up. And remember, this is Windows, we're going to configure and maintain this guy using remote desktop. So RDP is already set up from anywhere. Now, if I wanted to, I could do something cool like this, and say, just to my IP, so this is actually for where I am right now, this is the IP address of where I'm at.
So nobody is going to be able to get to my server unless they're using RDP. And they're doing it from my IP address here in the comfort of my house. Now, it's going to be a web server. So I want to add a rule here. In this case, I'm just going to add HTTP. So now it'll allow incoming HTTP from anywhere.
So I think I like the way that looks. So I'm going to review this and give it a launch. Now. Here's basically the ru shore screen. It shows what you're setting up. It says how your security setup everything like that.
What I'm going to do here is let's just go ahead and click Cancel. Because I've already got one of these running. So let's instead, go ahead and take a look at my existing running system. So here, I'm just going to click on running instances. And here's my up and running system. Now, there's really not much to look at from this screen, other than a few important things.
Like for example, here's my public IP address. I'm going to cut, I'm going to copy that and you'll see why in just a minute. So this is my IP address. Here's its internal IP address right here. And if you scroll down, there's a little bit more information but right now it's up and running. So if I want to actually administer this, I'm going to be running good old Remote Desktop.
So I was in there before so it remembered the address. So I'm going to go ahead and hit Connect. And it's going to want a password. I got this password. Why I actually helped set all this up. We'll just hit OK. And I am now in the Windows Server that I had just set up.
So this thing's pretty much up and ready to cook. I even went so far earlier is I got is running on here already. So all I really need to do at this point is let's go to a regular browser. Just open up a tab here. And if I've done this right, I'm just gonna punch this password in and I am on right now. I am on the website that I just generated.
Are you wrapping your mind around what just happened here? Infrastructure as a Service, in this case provided by Amazon Web Services, and a W They're probably one of the more popular ones. But they're certainly not the only provider out there gave us the ability to create an infrastructure which included a web server running the operating system of choice windows. It set up a virtual switch. It's got a virtual router set up in there. That's doing Nat.
So we have internal IP addresses. That gave us a public IP address that we didn't have to beg from our ISP. There's a firewall preset up, we went in, did some configuration and tada, we set up a website, a public website, on the internet in what, not even four minutes How long did it take anybody time me? So you kind of need to wrap your mind around how incredibly powerful AI is, is. It takes care of everything for us, for people who are developing websites, for web, web applications, things like that. This is pretty much the go to way of doing things.
It's powerful. We don't have to worry about hard drives. Go Going down we don't have to worry about our ISP going out we don't have to worry about our router heating up at two in the morning. The entire infrastructure is provided to us at a surprisingly low price.