AWS EC2
Build a fundamental understanding of EC2, one of the most important AWS services.
Introduction to EC2
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is one of the most popular AWS services. Introduced in 2006, it was one of the first services offered by AWS. EC2 is the most basic and essential service for all the AWS certification exams.
EC2 is an IaaS. We primarily use it to provision virtual servers for our applications on AWS. EC2 also has services like Elastic Block Store (EBS), Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), and Auto Scaling groups (ASGs), which are used in various combinations with the EC2 instances to form different types of architectures. One of the most important benefits of cloud computing is the on-demand availability of services, which EC2 provides.
EC2 features
Let’s look at some important features of the AWS EC2 service.
- EC2 instances can operate Linux, Mac OS, and Windows operating systems (OS).
- EC2 supports on-demand provisioning of servers. We can provision and terminate EC2 instances at any time. AWS will only charge us for the type of instance we use and the exact time we use it.
- Users can reserve EC2 instances for long durations to get up to a 70% discount on the on-demand pricing.
- Storage types include:
- EBS
- EFS
- Instance stores
- Users have complete control over the networking capabilities of the EC2 instance.
- Every EC2 instance has at least one security group, which can be configured to act as a firewall.
- AWS offers over 70 instance types, each