Read Part 1 here. After waiting several hours, AWS was ready. I started with a vanilla instance of Ubuntu 16.04. I didn’t customize it at all–mostly because Amazon limits your configuration choices within the free tier, which makes sense to me. It was amazing to see how much power you could really use. For example, if money was no object, you could choose an instance that would support 72 virtual machines with 512 GB of memory. Read that again, not 512GB of storage, but of actual memory. Which I find truly amazing. For comparison, the most beastly Mac I could customize on Apple.com maxed out at 64GB of memory, almost 9x less than what you can get through AWS.
Amazon offers the ability to create a public/private key pair to secure your virtual machine. I downloaded a copy of my RSA Private Key .pem file and loaded it into my password manager for safekeeping. I set my instance to allow inbound SSH traffic from only my IP.
Then one SSH command and I was in:
ssh -i 'path/to/my/.pem' user@IPv4 address
Once SSH’d in, I created a new user with sudo privileges and the real work to begin installing Ghost can begin.