Deep Learning in the Cloud Tutorial

Set Up an AWS Deep Learning AMI (DLAMI)

Featured image by author, incorporating a free photo from Krzysztof Kowalik on Unsplash.

This post explains how to set up an AWS Deep Learning Amazon Machine Image, or AWS DLAMI.

An AWS DLAMI is a machine in the cloud that you can access to train and evaluate deep learning models, without having to build a physical computer containing an expensive GPU. Depending on how you configure the DLAMI access, multiple people on your team could share the same DLAMI. You can create relatively inexpensive DLAMIs that have a moderate amount of compute for smaller-scale modeling, or you can create expensive DLAMIs with an immense amount of compute for training large models.

I’ll also cover:

• how to set permissions on your .pem file to enable SSHing into your DLAMI from a Windows computer;
• how to get your DLAMI to access data in S3 buckets even if you have MFA configured for your AWS account;
• how to use the boto3 Python package to access data in S3 buckets.

Step 1: Create an AWS Account

If you don’t already have an AWS account you’ll need to create one.

Step 2: Launch a DLAMI

The official docs for launching a DLAMI are here. There are multiple ways to launch a…