Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 








What is Amazon EC2? 

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers scalable computing power on demand within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Utilizing Amazon EC2 helps lower hardware expenses, enabling quicker development and deployment of applications. You can launch any number of virtual servers based on your needs, set up security and networking, and oversee storage. It's possible to increase capacity (scale up) to manage computationally intensive tasks, such as monthly or annual operations, or during traffic surges on your website. When demand decreases, you can also decrease capacity (scale down) as needed. 

An EC2 instance functions as a virtual server within the AWS Cloud. When you initiate an EC2 instance, the instance type you choose dictates the hardware configuration available for your instance. Each instance type provides a distinct combination of computing power, memory, networking, and storage capabilities.

Features of Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 provides the following high-level features:

Instances

Virtual servers.

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)

Preconfigured templates for your instances that package the components you need for your server (including the operating system and additional software).

Instance Types

Various configurations CPU, memory, storage, networking capacity, and graphics hardware for your instances. 

Amazon EBS Volumes

Persistent storage volumes for your data using Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS).

Instance Store Volumes

Storage volumes for temporary data that is deleted when you stop, hibernate, or terminate your instance.

Key Pairs

Secure login information for your instances. AWS stores the public key and you store the private key in a secure place. 

Security Groups

A virtual firewall that allows you to specify the protocols, ports, and source IP ranges that can reach your instances, and the destination IP ranges to which your instances can connect.

Amazon EC2 facilitates the handling, storages, and transfer of credit card information for merchants or service providers and has been certified as compliant with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS).

Related Services

Services to use with Amazon EC2

You can use other AWS services with the instances that you deploy using Amazon EC2.
  • Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling- Helps ensure you have the correct number of Amazon EC2 instances available to handle the load for your application. 

  • AWS Backup- Automate backing up your Amazon EC2 instances and the Amazon EBS volumes attached to them.

  • Amazon CloudWatch- Monitor your instances and Amazon EBS volumes. 

  • Elastic Load Balancing- Automatically distribute incoming application traffic across multiple instances. 

  • Amazon GuardDuty- Detect potentially unauthorized or malicious use of your EC2 instances. 

  • EC2 Image Builder- Automate the creation, management, and deployment of customized, secure, and up-to-date server images. 

  • AWS Launch Wizard- Size, configure, and deploy AWS resources for third-party applications without having to manually identify and provision individual AWS resources. 

  • AWS Systems Manager- Perform operations at scale on EC2 instances with this secure end-to-end management solution. 

Additional Compute Services

You can launch instances using another AWS compute service instead of using Amazon EC2.

  • Amazon Lightsail- Create websites or web applications with Amazon Lightsail, a cloud platform that offers the necessary resources to swiftly launch your project at an affordable, predictable monthly cost. 

  • Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)- Deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications on a cluster of EC2 instances. 

  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)- Run your Kubernetes applications on AWS.  

Conclusion

Features of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud are discussed. 






































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