Creating a new Compute Instance is quick and easy using the AURO dashboard. In order to make the instance public-facing, there are a couple extra steps which will be outlined in this article. This article will assume you have recently signed up and logged into your AURO dashboard without any previous configurations being done to the account.

The first thing is to create a keypair. This will allow you to login to the instance you have created.
On the left side of the dashboard under "Compute", click into "Access & Security".



From here, go to the "Key Pairs" tab.



Click on the "Create Key Pair" button and add the name you wish to associate the key with. Once complete, the key will automatically generate and download. This will be called <keyname>.pem. You can associate your SSH client with this key and gain access to the server by logging in with the distro name by default (i.e: ubuntu, fedora, centos etc.).

Now we will need to create a "Security Group" to allow the instance to be public-facing. Do this by clicking into the "Security Groups" tab beside "Key Pairs".

From here, click on "Manage Rules" for the default group, and then click on the "Add Rule" button. This will allow connections to go to/from the instance. For the sake of this tutorial, we will open SSH to all IP blocks.



Simply select "SSH" from the "Rule" dropdown menu and leave "Remote" as CIDR and the "CIDR" field as the IP wildcard 0.0.0.0/0. Once you click on "Add", this rule will be applied to the "default" security group and any instances part of "default" will have SSH access open.

Now, go to the "Instances" tab on the left panel and click "Launch Instance" at the top right.



The "Launch Instance" button will open a new window with some configuration options for the new instance.



From here, name your instance and choose your "Flavor". The "Flavor" is what will set the instance's resources. Details will show up on the right side as you select each Flavor. Under "Instance Boot Source", select "Boot from image" and pick your distro of choice.

In the "Access & Security" tab is where you assign the keypair and security group "default" we did earlier. Select your keypair and ensure the "default" group is checked.

Lastly, on the "Networking" tab, click the plus sign under the "Private" network or a custom internal network you have created. Do not use ext-net as your instance creation will fail. Once this is complete, click on "Launch" to launch the new instance.



Congratulations! Your first Canadian Cloud instance has been created!

The last step is to assign a Floating IP to the instance. This is a public, dedicated IP, which will allow external connections to the instance.

On the left menu, click into the "Instances" section under "Compute". On the far right side of your instance, click the arrow-down under "Actions". Select "Associate Floating IP". This will automatically add an external IP to the instance and will be visible under the "IP Address" column.



From here, if you do not have a floating IP allocated, click on the + sign, which takes you to an additional popup to assign a new floating IP to your project. Once added, you will be back on the first screen and can allocate a new IP.



Once these steps are complete, you can SSH into the instance using the Floating IP, and your keypair.

For persistent, important data we highly recommend using a Volume. This is separate from the instance OS so any corruption on the instance and ephemeral storage would not effect the volume data. This data can be attached to a new instance to recover data in case of OS corruption. You can follow along our Volume guide here: https://helpdesk.auro.io/staff/index.php?/Knowledgebase/ViewKnowledgebase/Article/2/1