Gotcha of the Day: Opening a Windows Based EC2 to the World

So, I tried my hand at setting up a Windows based EC2 server. It's almost too easy. EC2 makes getting the instance setup trivial, and WampServer makes installing PHP + Apache + MySQL a breeze.

Problem was, the outside world couldn't see the server. To fix this I did the following:

• Right click on the Wamp tray icon and selected Put Online. The online status doesn't indicate whether or not Apache is running, it indicates whether or not it's set to allow connections from other than localhost.
• Insure the EC2 Security Group allows HTTP
• Go to Control Panel » Windows Firewall and insure that it's set to off.

Bam! You're now open for business.

All of this assumes, of course, that you ready and willing to accept public traffic.

Obviously, this is a quick and dirty setup that worked well for my test purposes. This is probably not the configuration you want for a production environment.