EC2: AMIs and Operating Systems
Explore the use of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to launch EC2 instances with different operating systems. Understand how to select Linux, Windows, or Mac OS on EC2, including licensing costs and hardware requirements. This lesson helps you grasp how to configure EC2 instances for various development and deployment scenarios.
Overview
EC2 allows us to run multiple operating systems on our EC2 instances. The vast majority of web applications run on Linux, but for other use cases, it might be helpful to have access to Mac and Windows instances. One example would be app development. Imagine we are working for a company that builds both Android and iOS apps. We could use an EC2 Mac instance to compile the iOS version of this app.
So, how can we choose which operating system is running on our EC2 instance?
This is done through AMIs (Amazon Machine Images). Let’s take a look at how we can run different operating systems.
Linux
Running versions of the Linux operating system is very straightforward on EC2. We just need to select the right AMI and start our EC2 instance with it. If we create a new EC2 instance through the AWS Console, we can ...