Introduction to Amazon EC2

Cloud computing has become a significant component in the digital landscape due to its flexibility and cost efficiency. Organizations and businesses have migrated from on-premises architecture to the cloud due to higher costs and a rigid structure. Organizations had to manage, secure, and maintain servers; this became a hassle and a costly solution. The running cost of on-premise servers was a big problem in terms of scalability. Cloud providers, like AWS, came up with a scalable and cost-effective solution, Elastic Cloud Computing, famously known as EC2.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers resizable compute capacity in the cloud to flexibly scale the resources up and down based on the demand. It allows users to run virtual servers, known as instances, for various computing tasks. EC2 offers a broad set of servers with the latest processors, storage, networking, operating systems, and different purchase models, including pay-as-you-go. EC2 is a secure, flexible, and scalable solution, enabling businesses to easily deploy, manage, and scale applications without investing in physical hardware.

In this chapter, we will cover in detail the different features of EC2: AMIs, instances, instance types, storage, and security options. We will learn about the user data scripts to launch EC2 in dynamic and scalable environments. We will explore how each feature affects the overall cost of the service. We will also learn how EC2 allows for the control of the deployment of instances using placement groups.

We will learn about multiple purchase options that offer flexibility and provide mechanisms to reduce EC2 costs. Lastly, we will focus on different storage options, including EBS, Instance store, and S3.