AWS: Elastic Cloud Compute – EC2

Elastic Cloud Compute known as the EC2 in short is one of the core service form AWS operating from multiple data centers around the world.

What does EC2 do?

EC2 is can be used to run applications, create virtual desktops, use 3rd party software with it and most importantly computing.

What does “Elastic” mean basically?

It means the instance which are running computing operations can increase or decrease at will.

Basic unit of EC2 is an instance.

What is an Instance?

An instance is basically a virtual server which is an operating system agnostic.(bsically a virtual OS)

EC2 uses AMI(Amazon Machine Image to create instances).

AMI = OS + Software used on a EC2 instance

Amazon only updates the image software, not your instance.

Let us compare the configurations provided by AWS for large instances.

Instance Types	VCPU	Memory(GB)	Network
General Purpose – t2.large	2	8	Low to Moderate
Memory Optimized – r3.large	2	15	Moderate
Compute Optimized – c4.large	2	3.75	Moderate

Suggestion – Use EC2 for scaling AMIs.

Security Groups in EC2

Security Groups are the IP based configuration rules for a single or group of serverless instances.

Security Groups control which of the IPs your instances can talk to and which IPs can talk to your instances.

Scenarios of Security Groups:

Control who can SSH into the EC2 instances.
Allow access between the EC2 instances
Allows the access to Databases.
Allows HTTP requests.

Pricing – EC2

EC2 instances are charged by the hours of usage.

Prices vary according to the instances type and AMI type.

Launch an Amazon EC2 Instance for Free. Free Tier includes 750 hours of Linux and Windows t2.micro instances each month for one year. To stay within the Free Tier, use only EC2 Micro instances.

Instance Type	AMI	Price Rate
r3.large	Linux	$0.166 USD per hr , $3.68 USD per Day
t2.micro	Linux	$0.013 USD per hr, $0.31 USD per Day, $10 USD approx per month