Welcome to the first video in appendix eight and I am going to show you in these videos that make up
appendix, say exactly how you can spin out really sometimes very expensive but elaborate security equipment
inside of a WC.
What a great way to test things for your clients.
What a great way to test things for your own organization.
What a great way to test things for you personally and expand your knowledge and learning.
This is really going to solve kind of two things.
Force number one, it's a bunch of things, right?
It's great that we're going to get hands on practice with these modern security devices and this is
also giving us much more rich experience with IWC.
So good, good, good stuff.
I'm glad you're joining me here for the appendix.
Let's get started.
I wanted to just start reminding you of what you're going to need to get started when you're ready to
do something.
Like what we'll pick on in these videos is the Firepower Management Center Appliance from Cisco Systems,
which is the appliance that you would use to manage all of the organization's fire power next generation
devices.
So I've got some really great news for you as far as what you are going to need.
It's going to be an AWB account.
Surprise, surprise, that's it.
That's all you're going to need.
You are going to be doing some rather intense infrastructure as a service work with IWC and so you are
going to need an admin account.
But keep in mind if you're in that whole list privilege kind of thing, that just reminded me of The
Big Lebowski if brevity is your thing.
But anyways, if you're into that whole brevity thing is what he said.
All right, well anyways, with the IWC admin account, keep in mind that if you did want to limit it
to like full VPC admin privileges, full easy to admin privileges, we're definitely going to need all
of these or almost all of these to be able to do this.
I'm going to go ahead and use just an IWC admin account, the built in template, which is going to
give me admin access to all of the services.
And the reason why I'm going so big like that, even though I don't need to, is because this is purely
a lab AWB account for me.
Yeah, I don't do any production workloads out of this account, so don't care as much about security
as I normally would.
Now, great news for you.
If you do not have an IWC account, I will show you the free tier page that you are going to visit and
you are going to get out a credit card and you are going to join the free tier with that credit card.
We are going to be spinning up resources here that go beyond the free tier.
So there is going to be small charges to your credit card.
I need you to be fully aware of that, but I'm going to show you how to spin up the FMC inside a virtual
private cloud inside of IWC.
Most of the stuff in here is going to be free.
The only charges of any significance are going to come from the FMC, which is running as an easy to
instance in the EC2 service.
And there is of course, we're going to be running a fairly large EC2 instance and that's the issue.
It's going to go outside of what is free in the free tier.
But I'll teach you how to you guessed it, shut down this FMC EC2 instance so you can spin it up, you
can play with it, you can practice with it, and then just immediately shut it down.
I would definitely have some kind of a system like a post-it note on your forehead or something, right?
Because you want to shut that down because the charges are on now.
I believe it's a seconds basis now.
That sounds bad for you, but that is great for you.
You see IWC used to round up those charges so gosh, I can remember when I believe they were as long
as an hour.
So you were charged per hour and what would happen is if you were in there for 15 minutes, it rounds
up to the hour and.
You know, that's a bummer because we actually didn't use it for that long.
So AWB has been very gracious to their customers and they say, okay, look, if you're using it for
15 seconds, we'll just charge you for that.
It's more along the lines of AWB LAMDA, which is the serverless compute engine inside of engine.
It's not an engine, it's an entire service.
The Lambda Service is the serverless compute option and that's done in fractions of seconds.
The charges are amazing and that's how you saved so much money.
All right.
So let's show you two sites that might be important to you.
One definitely is going to be important to you.
The other would be important to you if you don't already have an admin account.
And in fact, that just made me think of a pretty important point.
The eight of us, free to your account, may be something that you are interested in because you want
to make sure you are in a completely separate account from any of your work accounts, you know, any
of your production workload.
So you may want to do what I did and set up one account for specifically this purpose.
As a matter of fact, with the new service in AWB called AWB organizations, check that out if you haven't
already, that's a great service where you can set up your IWC organization and then you can go in and
set up different accounts that will fall under that one.
You can roll up all the billing, but you have completely separate accounts for different workloads
and stuff.
Great thing that finally arrived to IWC like a couple of years ago.
All right, so let's see.
What are we doing here?
Oh, yeah.
Free tier.
It couldn't be any easier.
You're just going to do a google search on IWC free tier.
The first non advertisement link that comes up I would trust and then come here and create your free
account.
So you're just going to step through this process.
Remember, we're going to go outside the free tier a little bit.
So you are going to be dealing with some small charges, but the free tier isn't ruined for you and
it has lots of free stuff in it that you're going to enjoy for six months or a year or something like
that.
And don't forget, some of the free tier stuff always remains free.
You know, they give you like a gigabyte of S3 storage, and if you stay under the gig, you'd never,
ever pay for it.
So free tier account can help you out because you can go in and create an admin account.
I'll show you how to do that in the next video.
And yeah, you'll be all set.
Ready to go now where are we going to be going?
We're going to be going in pretty quickly to the MWC marketplace after you've got your free tier account.
And we're going to be doing a search for Cisco Firepower.
What a surprise.
So the IWC marketplace is where partners like Cisco of IWC will have their MWC ready images for us.
And you can see what we're going to be using is right here, the Cisco Firepower Management Center,
FMC Virtual Bring your own license version 7.0.0-9.
For now the bring your own license looks scary to us, but we're going to spin this up and then the
license we're going to bring is the evaluation license.
Yes, that is free of charge.
So we'll be able to play with this thing.
And one of the things I've noticed about doing things like this is, you know, you'll use this image
for its evaluation period.
And sure enough, before the expiration of your evaluation period, Cisco releases a new version of
the FMC up here.
And so for your lab environment, you're ready to destruct your current one and build the new one anyways.
All right, everyone.
Well, that's what we're going to be up to in this series.
I think you're going to love it and it's going to be a nice mix of firepower and IWC training.