Launching your first AWS EC2 instance and making it internet accessible

I assume this is your first EC2 instance and you just have the default VPC with default Security groups, Network Access list and Routing table etc.

As this EC2 is being created in default VPC, which by default has an Internet Gateway attached with a route specified to internet gateway in attached route table so, one only need to complete following steps to make it internet accessible,

• Create this EC2 instance with a Public IP

• If the instance was not created with a public IP then create an Elastic IP and attach it to the EC2 instance

• Identify the attached security group and create a custom inbound rule to allow traffic (RDP and ICMP etc) from an specific IP/Network or from anywhere (0.0.0.0/0)

Here you don’t need to create any outbound rule because Security groups are state full and on the other hand Network access lists by default allow all the traffic.

Note: If you didn’t select a security group during ec2 launch then the ec2 instance would have a new security group name Launch-Wizard-x created and attached, then you need to create custom inbound rules to allow RDP or ICMP traffic for this group.

If required, you can change the attached security group for an instance from here EC2 Dashboard => Network & Security =>Network interfaces.

That's it... :)