What is an EC2?

It stands for Elastic Compute Cloud. Its a virtual computing environment where you can continuosly open instances in the cloud with various operating systems.

You can use these instances to run a web application.

Running at dotnet application on an EC2

I used an Ubuntu EC2 to run mine. You need to install dotnet to run a dotnet application.

You can register the microsoft key with the following line:
wget -q https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/packages-microsoft-prod.deb
You install the required dependancies with:
sudo dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb (dpkg is packet managment software for installing)

The following 3 lines install dotnet 2.1:
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install dotnet-sdk-2.1

The next step is to publish your application. I did this by publishing on the rider editor.

You don’t need to do this but I combined the publish folder into a .tar file using:
tar -cvf publish.tar publish
(cvf = create verbose file)

I copied the .tar file to the ec2 with the following instruction:
scp -i “KeyPair.pem” /fileLocation/publish.tar ubuntu@ec2-num.ap- southeast-2.compute.amazonaws.com:

the publish.tar file should now be on your ec2 so it needs to be uncompressed tar -xvf publish.tar (xvf = extract verbose file)

next you need to run the .dll file in the publish folder with:
dotnet project.dll

If you are not using a server, you can redirect traffic outside of your local machine using: dotnet project.dll –urls http://ec2-num.ap-southeast-2.compute.amazonaws.com:5000

Automatically booting up the app on start up

you need to put the app’s publish folder in the root (to be accessed before the user loggin)
Sudo cp -r publish /apps I created a folder in the root called apps.

The next step is to to go to the file: /etc/rc.local and add the script to run the app at the bottom of the file eg:
dotnet /apps/publish/GreetingWebsiteV2.dll –urls http://ec2-52-64-221-91.ap-southeast-2.compute.amazonaws.com:5000

Why would you want to do this

You can leave the application running in the cloud so it can always be accessed and you can leave it running. You can also autoscale up more identical ec2’s if there’s too much web traffic and drop them during low traffic.