I’m trying out the free tier on Amazon EC2 and intend to host a couple of small websites through the same micro instance. I have set up and configured an EC2 micro instance running Windows Server 2008, with all the necessities. The websites are all ASP.NET MVC3 applications.
I have installed the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio and connected to my Amazon account, which all works well. The problem I have is that if I right-click my project in the Solution Explorer and choose Publish to AWS..., the only options I have is to publish it to a new instance. This does not work for me, as I want to host multiple sites on the same server.
Is it possible to publish to an existing instance using AWS Toolkit, and if so, how do I go about doing it?
As far as I understand it the quick answer is no. This is because the recommended process after launching a new instance is to change the local admin password from that set by AWS. Since the publish to cloud formation only has the AccessKey & Secret Access Key it cannot get the new admin password & as a result cannot connect to an existing instance.
The quick way around this would be to set the instance’s security group to allow FTP from your public IP address and then just publish via FTP.