provisioning a dot net core Ubuntu Linux server on AWS

Some notes about the provisioning and setup:

• AWS EC2 is where the VMs are seen. Choosing the region is important - the dashboard will not show the VMs in your account if the region is not set correctly!
  
  
• AWS offers a very large selection of machine types. We need to research costs before choosing one. For example, when I checked the pricing calculator for Mumbai region, a12xlarge with 16 MB RAM was $0.217 hourly, c5a2xlarge was $0.207, c6a2xlarge was $0.2057, but c52xlarge was $0.362. We can't assume that any family will be lower based on name prefixes, though some series like d are much higher due to higher specs. 
  
  
• In order to provision users who can access the VM via amazon's web console, the method chosen was to create a user group, create policies to give permissions to users in that user group, and create IAM users in that user group. 
  
  
• Creating custom policies - since we wanted the users to be able to do all EC2-related tasks like starting and stopping the VM, the method used was to make a copy of the supplied "All EC2 permissions" policy, edit the JSON and instead of having * as the Resources to which it applied, filling in the Amazon Resource Name instead.
  https://docs.aws.amazon.com/managedservices/latest/userguide/find-arn.html
  
  
• Amazon gives custom login urls, like
  https://our-name.signin.aws.amazon.com/console
  https://docs.aws.amazon.com/signin/latest/userguide/introduction-to-iam-user-sign-in-tutorial.html
  After logging in, we need to go to EC2, choose Instances on the left-hand side, ensure that we have chosen the correct region in the drop-down list on top of the page, and select our instance. For restarting, we can then choose the Actions menu on top of the page, Manage Instance State --> Start / Stop / Reboot. We have set "Terminate protection" on, so that the Terminate option is greyed out - which should be used only to completely remove the instance.
• If we don't opt for a dedicated IP - called Elastic IP in AWS parlance - we can use the hostname like ec2-9-999-999-99.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com where the nines seem to indicate the ip address. But I guess this name would change along with the dynamically assigned IP address if the machine were stopped and restarted after a while, so we need to assign an Elastic IP. One Elastic IP per instance are free if used on a running instance.
  

Since this post has already become long, I will put the software installation part on a separate post.