Amazon ec2 with windows 2008 server with TOMCAT

Question

I just created a free ec2 account. I want to test few things but i want to make sure that i am using ONLY the free version.

I want to run a java application in windows 2008 R2 server with TOMCAT as web server. Ec2 by default doesn't have java SDK and TOMCAT installed. SO here are the few queries

1. Will i be charged for installing TOMCAT and JAVA also for deploying my application?
2. How do i install TOMCAT and JAVA ? can someone provide a link?
3. I tried doing a remote desktop ut could not connect to the server. Looks like a firewall issue. But then how do i disable ?

Answer 1

Can't answer all your questions, but I'll take a shot.

If you want to watch your ec2 cost, setup a billing alert in AWS that will notify you when your account exceeds a certain threshold, and set your threshold very low if you are very concerend. You can always monitor your outstanding charges on your billing page on a daily basis if you are really concerned.

Pick a small or micro instance if you want to keep your costs low; micro instances I have found are mostly useless for any serious work, but they are very, very cheap and maybe ok for trying things out.

To install any software, you are going to need to get remote desktop working. Once the server is spun up, remote in and you can install anything you want; there is no extra cost to install software (except buying licenses if you need them, but that is not aws's concern, they won't be charging you for installing tomcat.

You need to open up the windows firewall on your 2008 server AND you need to make sure the AWS security group also allows incoming connections on port 3389 - its essentially there firewall that runs in addition to the EC2 instances firewall - BOTH need to be open. You can either modify the security group that was assigned to your instance, or create a new one and associated it with your instance.