The Wingu guide to creating your first cloud server. This guide explains how to create your very first server in the Wingu cloud by using our easy to use cloud dashboard. 1. Login to the dashboard by pointing your web browser to https://dashboard.wingu.co.za/auth/login/ 2. After entering your email address as the user name and your password, click the sign in button. You'll be greeted by our Overview page, showing how much of your allocated quota of cloud resources you have used. If you need more resources than what the default quota allows, please request an adjustment of your quota by logging into our customer dashboard. This is covered in a seperate guide.
3. Next we'll create an SSH key pair. This is an important step, as we'll use this key to autenticate against the servers. To do this, select the Compute option under the project tab on the left hand menu. Under the compute option, select the access and security option. Select the key pairs option from the menu ribbon. Click the create key pair button on the right of the screen. This brings up the key pair creation page. Enter a distinctive name for your keypair. I'll use My_first_key as an example.
Clicking the create key pair button, creates the key and brings up a dialogue to automatically save the *.pem key pair file. The file name in the example is my_first_key.pem. Safe this file and keep it safe! Without it you cannot securely authenticate against your servers. 4. Next we'll create a network to attach the server too. Select the network tab on the left menu, under the project tab. Next, select the network topology tab. A picture showing the network layout, with a single public network will be shown. We'll create a private network to attach our server. Click on the create network icon on the right hand side of the screen. The create network dialogue pops up. Give your new network to be created a name. In the example I'll use My_first_network.
This next step requires basic networking knowledge! We need to give the network a name, I stuck with My_first_network. We'll need to add a subnet and I selected a pretty standard network for internal use, 192.168.0.0/24, giving me 254 IPv4 addresses to use. You can select to use IPv4 or IPv6 addressing, but I'll stick with IPv4 as it is more common. As I want to connect my server to the Internet, I'll add a default gateway. In keeping with convention, I use the first address in the range as my gateway, entering 192.168.0.1 in the gateway field.
Click next to bring up the final step. We'll keep all the defaults in place, meaning that new servers in this range with get their IP addresses assigned via our cloud DHCP server. Finally, select create to create your network. On clicking the create button, our defined network is created and our network topology is automatically updated to show the default public network, and our new My_first_network with its network range of 192.168.0.0/24. If we wish to access this server from the Internet in future, we'll come back here to create a router to link the our private network and the system's default public network. For now, we'll skip ahead and create a firewall for our server to use. 5. We take security very seriously, so we provide firewall functionality via our security groups. To create a security group for our server to use, select the compute tab on the left menu, and then select the access and security option. Once selected, click on the security groups icon on the top menu. A list of existing security groups is displayed. The default group allows a server to communicate outward (egress), but allows no inbound (ingress) traffic without a matching outbound connection. For our first server, we'll assume that the server will be a web server. In order to access the web content on this server, we'll need to open up TCP port 80 for HTTP services. Let's do it!
Click on the create security group icon to bring up the creation dialogue box. I'll name my rule Web_servers and add a description to describe the nature of the rules in this group. I used Basic web server access rule. Once filled in, click on the Create security group icon and create your security group. Your new group will now appear in the security group list. We'll edit the rules by clicking on the manage rules icon on the right. This brings up a screen showing our default rules for outbound (egress) IPv4 and IPv6 only. We'll now add our inbound HTTP rule. Click the add rule icon in the top right corner. This brings up the rule creation dialogue. Click in the first rule field and scroll down to find the HTTP service.
Once HTTP is selected, a few options disappear and we have a new dialogue showing the remote group. Select CIDR in the drop down list. This is the standard name for a network address. We'll then keep the default 0.0.0.0/0 entry, as we want our web server to be accessable for any IPv4 address in the world. Finally, click the add icon on the right hand side to add the rule. The rule is created, and a summary showing our new inbound rule for allowing HTTP traffic is shown. We're now ready to create that web server :-) 6. To create your web server, select the compute icon on the left side menu, under project. Then click on the instance icon on the left of the screen. It brings up the instance view, currently showing no instances.
Click on the launch instance icon on the right hand side. This brings up the create instance dialogue. This is a multi-step process. We'll select a zone to place our server in, give it a name, select its size, how many servers we want, the kind of operating system to run, the network to attach it to and finally which security group (firewall) to use. Let's go! I selected Any availability zone for the placement of my server. This means that Wingu will select the best place to run my server. I could have manually selected any of the listed availability zones. Next I'll give my server a name, in our example I selected My_web_server. Now we choose the resources for our server. I selected the m1.medium size, giving me a 2 vcpu's, 20GB of disk and 4GB of RAM. I opted to only create one server instance. To get an operating system on my server, I select the boot from image option from the Instance boot source dropdown list. Finally I choose Ubuntu Linux as my operating system. Once all the details are filled in, select the acess and security tab at the top of the screen. This brings up a dialogue where I can select my key pair to use for authentication. Here I select the My_first_key option that we created earlier. Also select the security group. Here I select the Web_servers group created earlier.
Lastly, we select the networking tab from the top menu ribbon. This brings up the network dialogue. This shows that my server has one network card (NIC) and it automatically selected the earlier created network My_first_network. We're done! Hit the launch icon on the right to start the server.