Introduction to AWS EC2
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. EC2 simplifies the process of scaling and maintaining compute resources, offering a wide array of instance types, storage options, and networking configurations to suit diverse workloads.
Key Features of AWS EC2
- Scalability and Flexibility:
- On-Demand Instances: Pay for compute capacity by the hour or second with no long-term commitments.
- Reserved Instances: Make a one-time payment for lower hourly rates and reserve capacity.
- Spot Instances: Leverage unused EC2 capacity at a discounted rate, suitable for flexible, fault-tolerant workloads.
- Variety of Instance Types:
- General Purpose: Balanced compute, memory, and networking resources (e.g., t3, m5 instances).
- Compute Optimized: Ideal for compute-bound applications that benefit from high-performance processors (e.g., c5 instances).
- Memory Optimized: Designed for memory-intensive applications (e.g., r5, x1 instances).
- Storage Optimized: High, sequential read and write access to large data sets on local storage (e.g., i3 instances).
- Accelerated Computing: Hardware accelerators, or co-processors, to perform functions such as floating-point number calculations, graphics processing, or data pattern matching (e.g., p3, g4 instances).
- Other Options:
- Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) Storage: Persistent block storage for use with EC2.
- Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud): Allows you to launch AWS resources into a virtual network defined by you.
- Elastic IP Addresses: Static IPv4 addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing.
- IAM (Identity and Access Management): Fine-grained access control to AWS services and resources.
- Security Groups: Act as a virtual firewall to control the inbound and outbound traffic to EC2 instances.
Getting Started with AWS EC2
After register and insert your credit card actually you can use amazon EC2 for FREE at the first year using some free instance type that available on your account, so lets start!
- Login to your AWS account then find EC2 on the services
- Click Instances menu on the sidebar then click launch instances button on the top right
- Name your Instance then select the OS – Select the free OS like Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
- Select the Instance type (Use t2 micro for free)
- Create Key Pair – Select PPK if you use Putty, Select PEM if you use OpenSSH to connect to your instance
- Enter Security Group Name and Description
- Enter Disk space and Disk type – You can use 30GB & GP3 for Free
- Click Launch Instances then wait until the instance status is running and all status passed
- Done
Conclusion
AWS EC2 is a powerful and flexible cloud computing service that supports a wide range of use cases, from simple web applications to complex machine learning models. Its scalability, cost-effectiveness, and integration with other AWS services make it an essential tool for modern cloud computing.