Amazon web services looks very complicated at first but this document really helps to explain the different products they have.

http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Storage_Options.pdf

Amazon EC2 cloud allow root access to the Instance over ssh.  This is a Bad Idea. To secure your Instance and give you a more secure method to access it:

1. Log into your Instance
2. Add yourself a local account, make sure to add this account to the wheel group:
   # useradd -G wheel account
3. Set the password for the new account:
   # passwd account
4. Edit the /etc/sudoers file to allow your new account to perform commands:
   # visudo
5. Remove the comment from the following line in sudoers, I do the second line so I don’t have to use a password every time:
   ## Allows people in group wheel to run all commands
# %wheel        ALL=(ALL)       ALL
## Same thing without a password
%wheel  ALL=(ALL)       NOPASSWD: ALL

After you’ve edited the /etc/sudoers file, perform these steps on your Amazon EC2 Instance:

1. Change to your new account’s home directory:
   cd /home/account
2. Create a .ssh directory:
   mkdir .ssh
3. Copy the authorized_keys file from root to your new account:
   cp /root/.ssh/authorized_keys .ssh
4. Set the proper permissions on the .ssh directory and its contents:
   chown -R account:account .ssh

You can now access your Amazon EC2 account using your Private Key.

taken from: http://robpickering.com/2010/08/battle-of-the-clouds-rackspacecloud-vs-amazon-ec2-247

I just got an account with Amazon web services and I hope to get tomcat and mysql running sometime in the near future.

sudo apt-get install mysql-server tomcat6

That’s really as complicated as it gets. Depending on how you do your webapp deployment, you’ll want to install tomcat6-admin

this is what i think i have to do:

sudo apt-get install tomcat6-admin

Config files can be found in

/etc/mysql
/etc/tomcat6
/etc/default/tomcat6.

Start and stop servers using

/etc/init.d/tomcat6 start|stop
/etc/init.d/mysql start|stop

*http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5334989/installing-tomcat-6-and-mysql-server-on-ubuntu-ec2-instance