AWS EC2 - Introduction to Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

There can be two scenarios while predicting the required compute power. We may over-estimate the requirement, and buy a stack of servers that will of no use or maybe under-estimate the usage, which may affect the functionality of our application. So, we need resizable and scale up and scale down mechanism or service. So we have EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service from AWS.

EC2 is a web service provided by Amazon Web Services that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. They are resizable because the user can scale up and scale down the number of instances as per their requirement. Ec2 Instances can be Launched in one or more geographical regions or locations and Availability Zones (AZs).

Important steps to know before launching an Instance using EC2.

Here we can make the selection of Amazon Machine Image (AMI). AMIs are templates of operating systems. While launching an Instance user has to specify the AMI based on their Operating system requirement, it could be Linux, Windows, Ubuntu server, etc.,AMIs are pre-configured and Users can also configure it on their own requirements.
While configuring, the User has to select an EBS storage option. EBS stands for Elastic Block storage, which is a persistent block-level storage volume that can be used with EC2.

Types of Elastic Compute Cloud Instances

Amazon Web Service offers 5 types of instances which are as follows:

1)General Instances:

This type of instance is applicable for the application that requires a balance of Cost and Performance.

Example: Email responding systems where we need a prompt response as well as it should be cost-effective. Another side doesn’t require much processing.

2)Compute Instances:

This type of instance is applicable for the application that requires a lot of processing from the CPU.

Example: Data Analysis from a stream of Data.

3)Memory Instances:

This type of instance applicable for applications that are heavy in nature hence requires a lot of RAM.

Example: High-Performance Databases.

4)Storage Instances:

This type of instance applies to huge applications.

Example: Log processing Application

5)General Purpose:

This type of instances provides a balance of memory, compute and networking resources

Example: web Servers and Code Repositories.

Below are the steps for Instance Creation: (Ubuntu 16)

Management Console: Enter your Username and Password

Select preferred location: Select a region from the drop down shown below and this can be done based on User’s requirement.

Go to Services and select EC2 services under Compute. This will take you to EC2 Dashboard, Click-on Launch Instance.

Follow Step by Step now:

Step 1:Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

Select Ubuntu 16 Ami as the requirement is to launch Ubuntu 16 instance.

Step 2: Choose an Instance Type

Select t2.micro because its free-tier eligible.

Step 3: Configure Instance Details

We can leave this as it is. It’s good to go with default options

Step 4: Add Storage

Step 5: Add Tags

Give name to your instance to keep track of all the instances.

Step 6: Configure Security Group

Step 7: Review Instance Launch

Review all your configuration and click-on launch, that will ask you to create key pair which enables you to login to that instance. Download the key pair and keep it safe. (this is the only way to login to the instance which we launched now).

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