Overview

For many software developers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Ubuntu Linux are our world. The Ubuntu instances on AWS have exceptionally performance, have almost unbelievable reliability, and are surprisingly affordable. Establishing a server on an AWS EC2 Ubuntu instance can be a little intimidating at first to setup, configure, backup, and operate. As such, there are numerous Ubuntu Linux tips and short-cuts that one learns on this development journey. Here is my growing list:

Updates to Ubuntu

What if after accessing the AWS EC2 Ubuntu instance using SSH via terminal (mac) or PuTTY (Windows), the login result to the Ubuntu instance shows a message about pending updates similar to the login below?

Welcome to Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.4.0-1029-aws aarch64)

 * Documentation:  https://help.ubuntu.com
 * Management:     https://landscape.canonical.com
 * Support:        https://ubuntu.com/advantage

  System information as of Wed Nov 25 15:37:07 UTC 2020

  System load:  0.0               Processes:             143
  Usage of /:   20.4% of 7.59GB   Users logged in:       0
  Memory usage: 23%               IPv4 address for ens5: 172.31.62.232
  Swap usage:   0%

 * Introducing self-healing high availability clustering for MicroK8s!
   Super simple, hardened and opinionated Kubernetes for production.

     https://microk8s.io/high-availability

42 updates can be installed immediately.
15 of these updates are security updates.
To see these additional updates run: apt list --upgradable


Last login: Tue Nov 24 22:49:38 2020 from 71.197.165.101
To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo <command>".
See "man sudo_root" for details.

Updating the Ubuntu Linux AWS instance involves a few simple commands:

Fetches the list of available updates:

sudo apt-get update

Installs the updates:

sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

Cleans up /var/cache/apt/archives:

sudo apt-get clean

Removes old kernels:

sudo apt autoremove

Reboots the EC2 instance:

sudo /sbin/reboot

Although this is quick, we can do better. If a .bash_aliases file is created, it will be processed by .bashrc file upon reboot. Therefore, this is a good place to combine all of these commands into a single alias. To create the .bash_aliases file, enter the following:

sudo nano ~/.bash_aliases

Add this line, which is which is a concatenation of the previous commands, then save file:

alias update='sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade && sudo apt-get clean && sudo apt -y autoremove && sudo /sbin/reboot'

Reboot instance:

sudo /sbin/reboot

Now, to update Linux, type:

update

Getting Information on Disk Storage and CPU Utilization

It is important to understand how much disk storage and memory is being use and how much CPU is being utilized. Here are two commands and their typical responses on an AWS EC2 ‘t2.micro‘ instance.

Provide a list of storage devices with usage information:

df -H
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            512M     0  512M   0% /dev
tmpfs           104M  3.2M  101M   4% /run
/dev/xvda1      8.3G  1.3G  7.0G  16% /
tmpfs           520M     0  520M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.3M     0  5.3M   0% /run/lock
tmpfs           520M     0  520M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           104M     0  104M   0% /run/user/1000

Provide memory usage and CPU utilization information (use ctrl-c to exit top):

top
top - 19:52:37 up 3 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.02, 0.07, 0.03
Tasks: 108 total,   1 running, 107 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.0 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni,100.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem :  1014644 total,   817484 free,    45944 used,   151216 buff/cache
KiB Swap:        0 total,        0 free,        0 used.   813248 avail Mem

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
    1 root      20   0   37756   5720   3896 S  0.0  0.6   0:02.38 systemd
    2 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
    3 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 ksoftirqd/0
    4 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/0:0
    5 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/0:0H
    6 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/u30:0
    7 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.04 rcu_sched
    8 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 rcu_bh
    9 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
   10 root      rt   0       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0
   11 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kdevtmpfs
   12 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 netns
   13 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 perf
   14 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 xenwatch
   15 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 xenbus
   16 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.02 kworker/0:1
   17 root      20   0       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khungtaskd
   18 root       0 -20       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 writeback
   19 root      25   5       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksmd
   20 root      39  19       0      0      0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khugepaged

Other Tips

I will continue to add to this collection of AWS EC2 tips as I discover them!