Prerequisites For Using Elastic Load Balancing in Amazon VPC

Sign up for Amazon Web Services (AWS). If you haven't signed up for AWS yet, go to http://aws.amazon.com and click the Sign Up Now button.

Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

Alternatively, you can accomplish load balancing tasks using the command line interfaces or the Query API. Install the tools you'll need to perform Elastic Load Balancing tasks. For information on installing the command line interfaces and the Query API, see Get Set Up with Elastic Load Balancing Interfaces.

Create your Amazon VPC with an internet gateway and create subnets in each Availibility Zone in which you want to load balance your instances. For information on creating Amazon VPC and subnets go to Get Started with Amazon VPC.

Launch the Amazon EC2 instances that you want to register with your load balancer in your Amazon VPC. For more information about launching Amazon EC2 instances, see Launching and Using Instances.

The examples in this guide assume that your VPCs are in the US East(Northern Virginia) Region. If your instances are in Europe, you can specify the EU(Ireland) Region by using the --region eu-west-1 parameter from the command line interface or by setting the AWS_ELB_URL environment variable.

For more information on using the region parameter with your Elastic Load Balancing commands, go to the Elastic Load Balancing Quick Reference Card. For information on setting your environment variable, see Installing the Command Line Interface. For information about this product's Regions and endpoints, go to Regions and Endpoints in the Amazon Web Services General Reference.