Azure for AWS professionals - Auto Scaling - AWS - 03 Creating Launch Templates

Note that this post is a part of the series. You can view all posts in this series here: Azure for AWS professionals - Index

Launch Templates is the information about how to create an EC2 instance. It has all the relevant information to launch a new EC2 instance. It contains other instance-level settings, such as the Amazon Machine Image (AMI), instance type, key pair, and security groups, etc. This helps you to provide a predictable and repeatable way of deploying multiple EC2 instances in your environment.

Please note that these provide similar functionality as Launch Configurations (which we will saw in the previous blog). Launch Templates is a new way of doing things. You can have multiple versions of a launch template but not for a launch configuration. Any new features are being added to the Launch Templates and that is what AWS recommends to use.

Launch Template (or Launch Configuration) is also required for creating Auto Scaling Groups in AWS.

Start by navigating to EC2 in AWS.

Navigate to the "Launch Templates" under the Instances category. If you will not have any templates here then you will be presented with the general information. Click on the "Create launch template" to start creating a new template.

You start by providing basic information like template name, version description,etc. Note that the version is one of the features that sets a launch template apart from a launch configuration in AWS. The later can not have any version.

If you want to use this template with the Auto Scaling then make sure to check the box to provide guidance as shown below.

Next provide the AWS Machine Image, Instance type details and Key pair information for login.

Next, you provide the networking details under Virtual Private Cloud to define the connectivity along with a security group. You also provide the Storage information.

Finally, you can add tags to your launch template. You also should configure at least one network interface for your EC2 instances. Click on "Create launch template" to create the launch template with all the selected settings.

Now that we have the Launch Template, we are ready to use it to create Auto Scaling Groups. We will check this in the upcoming blog.