Elastic Cloud Compute – EC2 Overview
- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
- EC2 eliminates the need to invest in hardware up front, so applications can be developed and deployed faster.
- EC2 can be used to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage.
- EC2 enables you to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing your need to forecast traffic.
EC2 features
- Virtual computing environments, known as
Ec2 instances
- Preconfigured templates for your instances, known as
Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)
, that package the bits you need for your server (including the operating system and additional software)
- Various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity for your instances, known as
Instance types
- Secure login information for your instances using
key pairs
(AWS stores the public key, and you store the private key in a secure place)
- Storage volumes for temporary data that’s deleted when you stop or terminate your instance, known as
Instance store volumes
- Persistent storage volumes for your data using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), known as
Amazon EBS volumes
- Multiple physical locations for your resources, such as instances and Amazon EBS volumes, known as
R
egions and Availability Zones
- A firewall that enables you to specify the protocols, ports, and source IP ranges that can reach your instances using
security groups
- Static IP addresses for dynamic cloud computing, known as
Elastic IP addresses
- Metadata, known as
tags
, can be created and assigned to EC2 resources
- Virtual networks you can create that are logically isolated from the rest of the AWS cloud, and that you can optionally connect to your own network, known as
Virtual private clouds (VPCs)
Accessing EC2
- Amazon EC2 console
- Amazon EC2 console is the web-based user interface which can be accessed from AWS management console
- AWS Command line Interface (CLI)
- Provides commands for a broad set of AWS products, and is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
- Amazon EC2 Command Line Interface (CLI) tools
- Provides commands for Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, and Amazon VPC, and is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux
- AWS Tools for Windows Powershell
- Provides commands for a broad set of AWS products for those who script in the PowerShell environment
- AWS Query API
- Query API allows for requests are HTTP or HTTPS requests that use the HTTP verbs GET or POST and a Query parameter named
Action
- AWS SDK libraries
- AWS provide libraries in various languages which provide basic functions that automate tasks such as cryptographically signing your requests, retrying requests, and handling error responses