Overview

Amazon elastic compute cloud is commonly referred to as EC2. It is a service of AWS which provides on demand, scalable compute resources to the users.

EC2 provides a proper infrastructure to develop and deploy your application faster thus reducing the need of creating a physical server. We can create multiple virtual server using EC2 also configure security and networking and manage databases.

Elastic is used here because this service can be scaled up or scaled down easily.

compute consists of OS, disk and CPU or processing power.

It provides user a way to use public cloud for their purpose and thus reduce their management or maintenance overhead like Timely upgrade, Security issues and server issues and also it reduce cost.

Servers in EC2 are called instances.

Features

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

Key pairs

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

Instance store volumes

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

Amazon EBS volumes

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

Regions, Availability Zones, Local Zones, AWS Outposts, and Wavelength Zones

Multiple physical locations for your resources, such as instances and Amazon EBS volumes.

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.

Elastic IP addresses

Static IPv4 addresses for dynamic cloud computinng.

Virtual private clouds (VPCs)

Virtual networks you can create that are logically isolated from the rest of the AWS Cloud. You can optionally connect these virtual networks to your own network.

Types of AWS instances

1. General Purpose Instance

2. Compute optimized Instance

3. Memory Optimized

4. Storage Optimized

5. Accelerated Computing Instance etc.

Regions and availability Zones

Since the servers created by any cloud providers are located at multiple places like in Europe , Asia etc. these are called region or regions of availability. we must consider regions while creating the instance because if if choose a region too far it will have ,more latency.

Inside each region there is availability zone like for Asia they have Mumbai India.

AWS Regions consist of multiple, physically separated and isolated Availability Zones that are connected with low latency, high throughput, highly redundant networking. Availability Zones consist of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, and housed in separate facilities.

This is just basic overview to get started with EC2 i will explain the procedure to create and use EC2 in future blog.