The Wingu guide to creating your first cloud server.
This guide explains how to create your very first server in the Wingu cloud by using our easy to use cloud dashboard.
1. Login to the dashboard by pointing your web browser to
https://dashboard.wingu.co.za/auth/login/
3. Next we'll create an SSH key pair. This is an important step, as we'll use this key to autenticate against the servers. To do this, select the “Compute” option under the “project” tab on the left hand menu. Under the “compute” option, select the “access and security” option.
Select the “key pairs” option from the menu ribbon.
Clicking the “create key pair” button, creates the key and brings up a dialogue to automatically save the *.pem key pair file. The file name in the example is
“my_first_key.pem”. Safe this file and keep it safe! Without it you cannot securely authenticate against your servers.
4. Next we'll create a network to attach the server too. Select the “network” tab on the left menu, under the “project” tab. Next, select the “network topology” tab. A picture showing the network layout, with a single public network will be shown.
This next step requires basic networking knowledge! We need to give the network a name, I stuck with “My_first_network”. We'll need to add a subnet and I selected a pretty standard network for internal use, 192.168.0.0/24, giving me 254 IPv4
addresses to use. You can select to use IPv4 or IPv6 addressing, but I'll stick with IPv4 as it is more common. As I want to connect my server to the Internet, I'll add a default gateway. In keeping with convention, I use the first address in the range as my
Click “next” to bring up the final step. We'll keep all the defaults in place, meaning that new servers in this range with get their IP addresses assigned via our cloud DHCP server. Finally, select “create” to create your network.
On clicking the “create” button, our defined network is created and our network topology is automatically updated to show the default public network, and our new “My_first_network” with its network range of 192.168.0.0/24. If we wish to access this server from the Internet in future, we'll come back here to create a router to link the our private network and the system's default public network. For now, we'll skip ahead and create a firewall for our server to use.
5. We take security very seriously, so we provide firewall functionality via our “security groups”. To create a security group for our server to use, select the “compute” tab on the left menu, and then select the “access and security” option. Once selected, click on the “security groups” icon on the top menu. A list of existing security groups is
Click on the “create security group” icon to bring up the creation dialogue box.
I'll name my rule “Web_servers” and add a description to describe the nature of the rules in this group. I used “Basic web server access rule”. Once filled in, click on the “Create security group” icon and create your security group. Your new group will now appear in the security group list.
We'll edit the rules by clicking on the “manage rules” icon on the right. This brings up a screen showing our default rules for outbound (egress) IPv4 and IPv6 only. We'll now add our inbound HTTP rule.
Once “HTTP” is selected, a few options disappear and we have a new dialogue showing the “remote” group. Select “CIDR” in the drop down list. This is the standard name for a network address. We'll then keep the default “0.0.0.0/0” entry, as we want our web server to be accessable for any IPv4 address in the world. Finally, click the “add” icon on the right hand side to add the rule. The rule is created, and a summary showing our new inbound rule for allowing HTTP traffic is shown. We're now ready to create that web server :-)
Click on the “launch instance” icon on the right hand side. This brings up the “create instance” dialogue. This is a multi-step process. We'll select a zone to place our server in, give it a name, select its size, how many servers we want, the kind of operating system to run, the network to attach it to and finally which security group (firewall) to use. Let's go!
I selected “Any availability zone” for the placement of my server. This means that Wingu will select the best place to run my server. I could have manually selected any of the listed availability zones. Next I'll give my server a name, in our example I selected “My_web_server”. Now we choose the resources for our server. I selected the “m1.medium” size, giving me a 2 vCPU's, 20GB of disk and 4GB of RAM. I opted to only create one server instance. To get an operating system on my server, I select the “boot from image” option from the “Instance boot source” dropdown list. Finally I choose Ubuntu Linux as my operating system. Once all the details are filled in, select the “acess and security” tab at the top of the screen. This brings up a dialogue where I can select my key pair to use for authentication. Here I select the
Lastly, we select the “networking” tab from the top menu ribbon. This brings up the network dialogue. This shows that my server has one network card (NIC) and it automatically selected the earlier created network “My_first_network”.
