The Amazon EC2 service allows you to add and remove instances dynamically for the purpose of scalability. However, the above mentioned scalability need and auto addition of the instances can cause issues for firewall configuration and maintenance, which traditionally rely on IP addresses, subnet ranges or DNS host names as the basis for the firewall rules.

The Amazon EC2 provides a firewall to assign to the EC2 instances. The AWS EC2 firewall is configured through the user-defined groups.  When new instances are launched or additional instances are added or removed, the appropriate rules are enforced. Similarly, if the user changes a rule for a group, the changes are automatically applied to all the members of the group.

The present guide demonstrates how to manage a security group.

1. Go to the AWS Console through the URL http://aws.amazon.com/console . Select the EC2 service.

2. Select security groups from the EC2 dashboard.

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3. The Security Group console shows all the existing security groups of that region. Click on the “Create Security Group” button.

4. Provide the name of the security group and the description. If the user is launching the instance in VPC then select “VPC”, or else select “No VPC”. Click on “Yes, Create”.

5. The security group will be created and available in the Security Group console. To delete a security group, select the security group and click on “Delete”.

6. AWS will ask for a confirmation before deleting the security group. Click on “Yes, Delete”.

7. The group will be deleted immediately and removed from the AWS Security group listing.

8. If a security group is assigned to some instance, AWS will not allow for deleting that security group.

9. To run the above mentioned steps through the command line interface, first setup AWS EC2 CLI to launch an instance with the command line option, as explained here.

10. Run the command bellow to describe all the groups of that region:

ec2-create-group --region <region name> <Group Name> –d <Description of the group>

ec2-describe-group  --region <region name>.

The command ec2-delete-group -region <region name> <group name> will delete the security group.

11. The actual output is shown below:

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