First things first. You are going to need an account with AWS.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform which means you can rent computer hardware, services and just about anything you could think of related to computing. For your Aion node, you will only need to run an EC2 instance (hardware in the cloud that simulates a computer). These come in pretty much any size and configuration you or a rocket scientist could think of. Luckily for you, When you open an account there are many free benefits you can make use of.

Creating an account

Navigate to AWS. Add an email and password.

Fill in your details and then you will be asked for your credit card details. You will be able to use the free services but Amazon must have a payment method on file (You can set up alerts that will notify you when you reach a specified limit so you don't spend over your budget).

Setting up your virtual machine

You will now set up a custom computer running in the cloud. To begin with, you will set up a large machine, at the time of this article the blockchain is around 50GB in size which takes a lot of computing power to sync. This is a lot for a smaller machine to handle. You will download to the current block and then detach the hard drive and add it to a smaller machine (Don’t worry it’s easier than it sounds).

On the home page click on the ‘Services’ button at the top left. In the main section on the top left click on ‘EC2’ under the ‘Compute’ list. This is your dashboard that displays links to all configuration options. To build a VM (Virtual Machine) you click on the blue ‘Launch Instance’ button.

There is a multitude of options available but we will use a LINUX system and then use DOCKER to run our Aion node (Unfamiliar with Docker then check out the post here to get up to speed). You will choose the second option from the top Amazon Linux AMI 2018.03.0 (HVM), SSD Volume Type.

You will now pick a larger instance as we discussed before. Pick either the t2.large or t2.xlarge types. Then click on ‘Next: Configure Instance Details’ at the bottom right.

You only want to change one item on this page which is the fourth option from the top ‘Subnet’. Intentionally set it to any of the defaults on the list. This will matter when you merge a new instance to the volume once the blockchain has been downloaded. Then click on ‘Next: Add Storage’ at the bottom right.

You want to change the size to around 60GB (This will become larger as the blockchain grows with time). Take note of the device file path ( /dev/xvda) as you will be using this for swapping instances later. Now you can click on ‘Review and Launch’ which will take you to the overview of our build. Of course, you know that this is exactly what you want so we can continue and click ‘Launch’.

Upon clicking a pop up will ask you to create a key pair. This is so you can securely access your AWS machine from a terminal on your local computer. Pick create a new key pair and name it something relevant. Click the ‘Download Key Pair’ and store it somewhere secure on your local machine.

You will now be taken to a screen with your running instance.

Congratulations 👏 You now have a Computer ( Virtual Machine ) running in the cloud 🖥 ☁️.