EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud

In the AWS Cloud, an instance is a virtual server. You can set up and configure the operating system and applications that run on your instance using Amazon EC2. When you sign up for AWS, you can use the AWS Free Tier to get started with Amazon EC2.

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a web service interface that allows businesses to run application programs in the public cloud of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is intended to make web-scale computing more accessible to developers.  

Amazon EC2 cuts the time it takes to obtain and boot new server instances down to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity up and down as your computing needs change. These instances can be launched in one or more geographical locations or regions, and they can be launched in one or more Availability Zones (AZs).  

Each region is made up of several AZs in different locations that are linked by low-latency networks in the same region. This interface allows you to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you require, configure security and networking, and manage storage. 

Table of Content

1. Features of EC2 
2. EC2 instance types
3. How to create an EC2 instance? 
4. AWS EC2 price models
5. Difference between EC2 and S3 
6. Advantages/Benefits of EC2 
7. Disadvantages/Drawbacks of EC2 

Features of EC2

Amazon EC2 provides various features, such as reliability, security, flexibility, etc. Apart from these features, some of the other features are discussed below: 

1. Provides a highly reliable environment in which instances can be replaced quickly 
2. Consists of virtual computing environments, known as instances 
3. Provides pre-configured templates for your instances 
4. Works well with Amazon services such as Amazon S3, Amazon SQS, and so on  
5. Provides secure login information for your instances by utilizing key pairs 
6. Works in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud to provide resources with a secure and robust network 
7. Provides storage volumes for temporary data that are deleted when you stop, hibernate, or terminate your instance, known as instance store volumes 
8. Provides developers and system administrators with the tools they need to build failure applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios 
9. Allows to pay only for the resources that you have used

EC2 instance types:

There are five types of EC2 instances, and each of those instances is described below:

General Purpose

If you’re not sure what type to use, these general-purpose AWS EC2 instance types are a good place to start. Because this type of instance provides a balance of computing, memory, and networking resources. There are three general-purpose instances of family types:

• t instance family (t stands for tiny or turbo.)
• m instance family (m stands for happy medium or main choice)
• a1 instance family (al stands for Arm processor)

Compute Optimized

Compute Optimized instances are ideal for compute-intensive applications that benefit from powerful processors. EBS is optimized by default in this case. There is one compute-optimized instance family type:

• c instance family (c stands for compute)

Memory Optimized

Memory-optimized instances are intended to provide fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory. There are four memory-optimized instance family types:

• r instance family (r stands for RAM)
• x1 instance family (x stands for xtreme)
• High Memory instance family (High memory can describe itself…)
• z1d instance family (z stands for zippy)

Accelerated Computing

Accelerated computing instances make use of hardware accelerators to carry out activities like graphics processing or data pattern matching more proficiently. There are four accelerated computing instance family types:

• p instance family (p stands for pictures)
• infl instance family (inf stands for inference)
• g instance family (g stands for graphics )
• fl instance family (f stands for FPGA)

Storage Optimized

Storage-optimized instances are intended for storage-intensive tasks that involve frequent sequential read and write access to large datasets on local storage. There are three storage optimized instance family types:

• i3 instance family (i stands for IOPS)
• d2 instance family (d stands for dense)
• h1 instance family (f stands for HDD)

Let’s look at the data represented in the form of a tabular format to understand the differences between EC2 instances types:

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How to create an EC2 instance? 

Creating EC2 is very simple. There are a few steps that need to be completed to use EC2. If you are new to this and you just want to get hands-on experience, then it’s better to use free resources. These steps are: 

1. Login to your AWS account and click on the Services option, placed at the top left corner. 
2. A drop-down menu will appear. Under the Compute category, click EC2. The EC2 dashboard will open. 
3. In the EC2 dashboard window, in the right pane, under the Launch Instance section, click the Launch Instance button.  
4. At Step 1: Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Step: select an operating system that you want to use.  
5. At Step 2: Choose an Instance Type step, select an instance that you want to use by clicking on the radio button in front of it. Then click on the Next: Configure Instance Details button. 
6. At Step 3: Configure Instance Details step, review the settings, and then click on the Next: Add Storage button. In this step, you can edit the default settings as per the requirement. For example, you can increase the number of instances that will launch. 
7. At Step 4: Add Storage step, review the settings, and then click on the Next: Add Tags button. In this step, you can edit the default settings as per the requirement. For example, you can change the size of the free space available.  
8. At Step 5: Add Tags step, review the settings, or add a new tag as per the requirement. To add a new tag, click on the Add Tag button to easily identify your application. Once the tag has been added, click on the Next: Configure Security Group button. 
9. At Step 6: Configure Security Group step, review the setting, or change it as per the requirement. If you want to add a rule, click on the Add Rule button and then fill in the details such as Type, Protocol, Port Range, and so on. Once the changes have been made as per the requirement, click on the Review and Launch button. 
10. At Step 7: Review and Launch step, review all the settings and then click the Launch button. The Select an existing key pair or create a new key pair window will open.
11. In this window, from the drop-down list select Create a new key pair, and in the Key pair name box, type the name that you want to give. For example, Instance_key_pair.
12. Click the Download Key Pair button. Once it is downloaded, scroll down the Select an existing key pair or create a new key pair window and click the Launch Instances button.
13. Wait for 2-3 minutes for the instances to launch. Once they are launched you will receive a notification.

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AWS EC2 price models

The three pricing structures for Amazon EC2 instances are:

1. On-Demand Instances
2. Reserved Instances
3. Spot Instances

All these four pricing models are described in the table given below:

Difference between EC2 and S3 

Amazon EC2

It’s just a usual computer hosted on one of AWS’s datacenters. EC2 is designed to host your application on a server, which will then serve the contents via S3 and RDS, respectively. As a result, Amazon EC2 is suitable for any type of processing activity.

Amazon S3

Take an e.g. of any OTT platform (Netflix, Hotstar, Amazon Prime, and so on) that stores millions of video files that power their content. There have to be those video files and multiple versions of those stored somewhere. That’s where S3 comes into play. Amazon S3 is an AWS storage platform.

For better understanding let’s look at the differences in a tabular format:

Advantages/Benefits of EC2