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Virtual Machine on AWS

The AWS Virtual Machine template scaffolds a Pulumi project that provisions an Amazon EC2 instance running Amazon Linux 2023 inside a new Amazon VPC. The instance boots a small Python HTTP server on port 80 from user data, so the project deploys end to end out of the box. Use it as a starting point for a web application, backend service, or database VM.

An architecture diagram of the AWS Virtual Machine template

Using this template#

To use this template to deploy your own virtual machine, make sure you’ve installed Pulumi and configured your AWS credentials, then create a new project using the template in the language of your choice:

Terminal window
mkdir my-virtual-machine && cd my-virtual-machine
pulumi new vm-aws-typescript

Alternatively, you can create and configure a new project with this template (vm-aws-typescript) in Pulumi Cloud.

Deploy with Pulumi

Follow the prompts to complete the new-project wizard. When it’s done, you’ll have a complete Pulumi project that’s ready to deploy and configured with the most common settings. Feel free to inspect the code in index.ts for a closer look.

Deploying the project#

The template requires no additional configuration. Once the new project is created, you can deploy it immediately with pulumi up:

Terminal window
pulumi up

When the deployment completes, Pulumi exports the following stack output values:

ip

The IP address of the EC2 instance.

hostname

The provider-assigned hostname of the EC2 instance.

url

The fully-qualified HTTP URL of the HTTP server running on the EC2 instance.

Output values like these are useful in many ways, most commonly as inputs for other stacks or related cloud resources. The computed url, for example, can be used from the command line to open the newly deployed website in your favorite web browser:

Terminal window
open $(pulumi stack output url)

Customizing the project#

Projects created with the Virtual Machine template expose the following configuration settings:

instanceType

The EC2 instance type to use for the VM. Defaults to t3.micro.

vpcNetworkCidr

The network CIDR to use for the VPC. Defaults to 10.0.0.0/16.

All of these settings are optional and may be adjusted either by editing the stack configuration file directly (by default, Pulumi.dev.yaml) or by changing their values with pulumi config set:

Cleaning up#

You can cleanly destroy the stack and all of its infrastructure with pulumi destroy:

Terminal window
pulumi destroy

Learn more#

Related

The infrastructure as code platform for any cloud.