Welcome!
In this "Getting Started with Amazon EC2" video will: 
Create an EC2 account.
Start an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) that is free to use.
Start an AMI that needs to be purchased.

And we will do this in 8 minutes or less.

Create an EC2 account
We first create an ec2 account by visiting http://aws.amazon.com/
Click "Sign up for AWS Account"   (AWS. Amazon Web Services), and log on using your normal Amazon.com account.
After you fill in all the required fields you will get a confirmation email.

Now go back and click "Sign up for EC2"   (Or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud), there is a similar sign up process here.
You will be presented with the price list and will be asked for a credit card. You can use a credit card that is on-file with Amazon.

Create Certificate
All Amazon WebServices require you to have an X.509 certificate. Log on the EC2 and and click "Access IDs" on top right.
Scroll down the page and create an X.509 Certificate and re-authenticating. You may download the certificate and the private key
if you plan to use the Amazon EC2 Command line interface (CLI).

We are going to use the Amazon web console  for now, so we do not need the certificate and the private key.

Using Amazon Web Console  (http://aws.amazon.com/console/)
Using the amazon web console we can launch and manage EC2 instances. 
Before we launch any instances we have to create an ssh key pair and update firewall rules. A set of firewall rules is known on EC2 is known as a 
"security group"

Creating a key pair
In the Amazon console click "key pairs" on the left. Click "create new" and give it a name. 
After a key pair is created it is downloaded immediately. Save it in a safe place. The key is in a ".pem" format. 
Use puttygen to convert a ".pem" format key pair into a ".ppk" format which is used by putty. Save the ".ppk" key pair which will be used later.


Updating firewall (a.k.a Security Group)
Click "Security Groups" on the left and select the "default" security group.
Open tcp ports for ssh, http and https. Also remove the rule that opens all TCP ports.

Now we are ready to launch an AMI.

Launching 1st AMI
Click "Instaces" on the left and click "Launch Instance". From the quick start AMI you may select the 1st one. 
It is a Fedora AMI in this case. Select this AMI, "skip" the configure firewall section.
On the next screen select the "keypair" that you created and the "default" security group. Enter number of instances = 1.
And click launch. 

It takes about 2 to 5 minutes for the AMI to launch. Click "instances" again to monitor progress. Once an instance is running, click to get instance details. 
Copy the public dns name that ends with ".amazonaws.com". To verify that the vm is working correctly, use the public dns name and the
".ppk" key that was created previously with putty.

putty -i keypair1.ppk root@XXXX.amazonaws.com 

If the login succeeds, everything is working as expected. 
Remember to terminate the instance, otherwise you will be billed for the usage.

Launching for purchase AMI
Click "launch instances" and click "community AMI" tab. Search for "smash" to filter AMIs' .
Select the "smash 1101 AMI" and try launching it as before. 
You will find an error about subscription missing. This means that the AMI has not be purchased. 

The organization that want you to use their for purchase AMI should give you a subscription URL. 
Here we use the sMash development AMI subscription URL. Re-authenticate and buy the AMI.
This particular one costs $0.00 so it is safe to buy.

After buying the subscription if you relaunch the AMI it will succeed. 

As always terminate the AMI after you are done.