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Let's take a look at how we can set up an EC2 instance running Windows instead of Linux.

It's pretty much the same process. We're going to go into the EC2

dashboard, and I'm going to launch a new instance here.

I'll just call this—uh, I don't know—test Windows instance.

And for the quick start base image, we're obviously going to select Windows.

From the selection here, let's see... There are a few different options. Twenty

five server... I guess I could do 2022 as well.

I'm just going to go with the most recent one, but it looks like I don't actually have t2.micro as an option here.

I guess that's just for the 2025 version. So if I wanted, let's see, 2022,

then it would still be free-tier eligible.

Yeah, so the 2025 image, for some reason, doesn't run on the t2.micro,

but the 2022 version does. So if I want to use the free tier, I

would have to use Windows 2022, which I can do right here.

But to be honest, Windows instances use up more

resources, so I generally won't deploy Windows to a t2.micro.

I'll always go a little bit bigger. So I'm just going to go with t2.medium.

It's just easier to have more resources. Actually, maybe even a t2.large,

just for these Windows instances.

For the key pair, I already made one when we set up the Linux instance, so I can

just use that same key pair for all the EC2 instances as long as they're in the same region.

So I'm still in that Oregon region. Network settings—I'm going to leave, yeah, just the same.

I'm going to create a new security group here and allow RDP traffic instead of SSH traffic.

We'll connect to Windows instances by default using RDP—Remote Desktop Protocol—instead of SSH.

We'll see how to do that in a moment. I'll allow that from anywhere.

By default, we get 30 gigabytes for our SSD.

That seems fine. I'm just going to launch this instance. So this is just the most basic Windows instance.

That's launching, so I'll head over and grab the details here.

Again, I'm just going to select this instance. We can see all the details—it's going

to be just like the Linux details, but we're going to connect a little bit differently.

So I'm going to come over here and go to the RDP client

connection settings, because we are going to connect with an RDP client.

On my Mac, I have Microsoft Remote Desktop, and that's what I'll use to connect to this instance.

I think I can actually—yeah—I can download a Remote Desktop file, which I'll do right here.

So I'll just download that. It will go into my Downloads directory.

If I open that up, it should try connecting to my remote EC2 instance, but now I need the

password for the Administrator on the Windows EC2.

I can get the password here, and remember, we used

the same key that we used to connect over SSH for Linux.

So to get the password here, we actually have to use that same key that's stored on my

local machine and use that to generate a new password.

It's going to ask to decrypt a password, and it needs my private key.

Where do I put in the private key? Oh, I've got to wait four minutes after launching the instance.

That's kind of annoying. Okay, I guess I'll just wait four minutes.

So, in the RDP client, after four minutes once it's launched, you can click "Get Password" here because we'll need that to connect over RDP.

Right here, we upload the private key file. Again, this is the same key used for SSH when we

did the Linux instance, but we're going to use it now to generate the password for the Windows instance.

I can't actually see my hidden directories here, so I'm just going to open... my .ssh

directory on my Mac, and then it was that us-west-2 key.

There it is right there. I'm just going to drag that in and open it.

And this is my private key. You should never share this with anyone.

I'm just going to delete this after the video, but this is the key we use for SSH.

This is the key we're going to use to decrypt the password. So let's see...

Is it going to give me a password? There it is. That is my password.

So if I copy this, then head back over to RDP,

I can paste this password in—same password as right there.

And then if I continue and then allow, continue again,

this should now create an RDP connection to that Windows instance in Oregon.

Here we go. Okay, so yeah—I am now connected to a Windows instance in Oregon, which is pretty cool.

While this is setting up, I'm just going to head back over to

my web console so we can take a look at a couple of things.

First of all, if we go to launch a new instance—I'm not going to launch one right now—I just want to look at the settings.

So, for on-demand Linux-based pricing for a t2.micro,

it's going to be 0.0116 USD per hour.

If we're using Windows, it's 0.0162 per hour.

Okay, they seem like small numbers, but they add up, especially with bigger instances. We're paying more for Windows.

We have to pay for the Windows licensing fee, and Windows tends to be

more resource-intensive, so we're going to need a larger instance size.

It just kind of seems worse to use Windows when we could be using Linux—spending less and getting better performance.

There are occasions when you need Windows—and you know if you're a person who needs

Windows—but for the most part, when we're doing things, I think it just makes way more sense to use Linux.

However, I do sometimes like to set up a quick Windows instance when I need to test out Windows things.

For example, for this course, I have my CloudCourse CLI.

This is a full Windows setup. It even comes with the annoying pop-ups that I don't care about.

Come on, go away. I just want to use a browser—really, Microsoft?

Okay, here we go. Alright. So, like I said, for cloudcourse.dev, I had to make a

command line interface application that you could use to verify you've done everything correctly.

But this has to be cross-compiled and work on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

So, when I want to test on Windows and I don't have a Windows machine, it can be really,

really easy to just set up an EC2 instance running Windows and

then test out my applications on this instance rather than needing my own Windows machine.

I can then download my software that I want to test on Windows and make sure it works correctly.

Let's see. I'm going to open up a PowerShell prompt here and…now I have to remember PowerShell.

I think I can cd into…am I going to be able to just get away with that?

Downloads. Oh, nice. Okay, so I can cd into Downloads

and then I can try running cloudcourse.exe since it's a Windows machine.

Then I can just test out if my software works on Windows, or I can cross-compile on this actual Windows machine.

Like, I've had situations where I'm working on a desktop app and it just makes more

sense to compile on Windows, so I quickly set up a Windows VM for that.

So, for me, I really only set up these Windows EC2 instances when I need to test that something works on Windows.

And again, there are more use cases—some people need to set up their entire infrastructure on Windows EC2 instances.

But for the rest of this course, we're really just going to be using Linux EC2 instances,

except for the next part, where we're going to talk about Mac OS EC2 instances.