Creating your first AWS EC2 instance

Launching instance

Register AWS account and sign-in to AWS dashboard
Go to EC2 dashboard using navigation pane (https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2)
In Create Instance, click Launch Instance
Choose Amazon Machine Image (AMI), aka operating system (OS), you want to use
Click Review and Launch then click Launch for initiating virtual compute node

Note that you are able to change setting of a running compute node anytime.