Unable to install anything on my aws lamp ubuntu server

Question

I am trying to install unzip and vsftpd on my lamp server on my aws instance, but attempting to install anything results in the following error:

$ sudo apt-get install vsftpd
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  vsftpd
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 82 not upgraded.
Need to get 111 kB of archives.
After this operation, 361 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Err http://ap-southeast-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates/main vsftpd amd64 3.0.2-1ubuntu2.14.04.1
  Could not resolve 'ap-southeast-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com'
E: Failed to fetch http://ap-southeast-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/v/vsftpd/vsftpd_3.0.2-1ubuntu2.14.04.1_amd64.deb  Could not resolve 'ap-southeast-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com'

E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?

I've tried apt-get update and --fix-missing but still unable to install anything new.

The version details are as follows:

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Release:    14.04
Codename:   trusty

Answer 1

You can try below

1.) launch instances with user data like:

cloud-config

apt_mirror: http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/

The above will allow other portions of cloud-config that assume apt is set up properly to work.

Then try apt-get update & apt-get install

Answer 2

I'm not sure if doing this is the right way to do this, but I got it working by changing the apt-get mirrors in /etc/apt/sources.list to http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ but I made a backup of the file just in case.