 Hey, my name is Mike Penissi and I work at Boku. I train people about how to test front-end applications. In this screencast, I'm going to talk a bit about working with Amazon Web Services to set up a distributed stress test. What we'll do now is quickly run through creating an AMI with Amazon, and so at a high level what this is all about is we want to make an image that describes the stress testing machine, and so that way when we run our stress test, we can automatically make one instance of it, or we can make ten instances of it depending on how many clients we want to simulate and how much stress we want to put on our server. So, what you'll do is you'll want to launch a new instance, and let me just fix this a little bit. So you'll have to bear with me here. This interface is by no means responsive, and I've had to shrink things down a whole lot to get it all to fit, but basically we're going to step through here and make an instance of an EC2 instance from which we can make our image. As I point out in the blog post, most of this stuff can be free if you're just signing up for AWS now. You get one year of free usage, and throughout the interface it's careful to point out to you what options are available to you under the free usage tier. So as long as you stick within those guidelines, you won't be charged for anything. It's great if you're just getting your feet wet and, like me, you're nervous about being charged for things. So here we're selecting the operating system for our image, and so I'm going to pick Ubuntu because I'm familiar with that operating system and also because with this star it's eligible for free usage, so that's cool. Here we could change the instance type if we wanted to. We could use a more powerful instance, but you'll see that only the micro instance, the smallest instance, is eligible for free usage, and that's all right though because it's more than enough what we need today. Then for these advanced options, we don't really need to change anything. And here we're choosing a key pair, and so this is how we authenticate into our instances, and the system can know that it's us using them and not someone else. So I already have a key that I made for my work with PBS, but you'll likely want to create a new key pair, give it a name, and then download it, save it somewhere locally, safe, and that you can get to later. And we'll see that coming up later when we actually run the stress test. But for me, I'll use the one I already made. And we need to create a security group, and this is just basically kind of like firewall settings for your instance. And it's important in this case because we're going to be SSH-ing into our machines when we run the stress test, and not directly, we're going to be using this utility called bees with machine guns. But because that's using SSH under the hood, we'll want to make sure that these machines have port 22 open. And there's actually a predefined rule for SSH, which is here, and we'll just be able to add it. We want to give this thing a name, so stress test, add the rule, continue. Okay, and then you'll select done, and you'll launch an instance. So since I've already gone through this process since it takes a few minutes, I'm just going to skip over it. But suffice it to say, you'll click launch, you'll wait a few minutes, and then you'll have a new running instance listed in the dashboard here. So from there, you'll want to click on that instance, and let's see, select. Well, actually, let me not get ahead of myself. What you'll want to do there is use the URL here to SSH into it directly, and set it up the way that you need for your stress test simulator to run. So in my case, and likely in your case, it will be a Node.js app. So you'll want to install Node.js, then you'll want to get your stress testing code onto there. And again, this would be a good time to go back to this article here and review more detail about setting up the stress testing client itself. But again, what you're thinking about here is just making an image from which you can spawn a lot of instances later on. Once the image is prepared to your liking, you can go ahead and right click on it in the interface, and select create AMI. And now Amazon will take some time to make an AMI based on that EC2 instance. And over in the AMIs tab, you'll see that it's listed here. And you can now use this to make as many instances as you need in an easy, repeatable way. Next up, we'll be covering actually spinning up instances based on this AMI and using them in a real stress test. So stay tuned.