EC2

Amazon EC2: Features

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud enables us to launch a virtual machine in the AWS cloud and set up an EC2 instance—a virtual server. We can freely customize virtual servers by selecting the desired processor, storage, operating system, etc. We can also use the Amazon Machine Image, a template of an EC2 instance with pre-setup configurations. Currently, Amazon EC2 allows us to create 20 instances per region.

EC2 offers multiple storage options, such as instance storage, object storage, and block-level storage. Depending on our needs and workload type, we can also choose from three volume types: General Purpose, Provisioned IOPS, and Magnetic; they differ in storage performance and cost.

Amazon EC2 offers scalable computing capacity by enabling us to add or remove instances according to predefined scaling policies. Moreover, it provides the Elastic Load Balancing feature that evenly distributes traffic across instances.

Amazon EC2 works well with AWS services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, or Amazon CloudWatch, and thanks to the AWS Command Line Interface, we can manage them all with one tool.

Benefits of Amazon EC2 for businesses:

• Availability and reliability
• Flexibility
• Scalability
• Security
• Cost-effectiveness

AWS services are available in multiple geographical regions and availability zones, which makes it possible to access EC2 from almost anywhere.

Thanks to EC2's flexibility and scalability, we can choose from multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. EC2 provides us with resizable compute capacity and allows us to adapt instances precisely to the requirements of our applications.

Thanks to the use of Amazon VPC and security groups, EC2 provides high security. Moreover, it enables you to manage permissions and control access.

Amazon EC2 offers different pricing plans, allowing us to plan the allocation of our resources and decide which package is most suitable for us.

Types of instances

As mentioned, instances are virtual servers allowing us to launch cloud applications. Amazon's instance types differ in terms of central processing unit, the amount of memory and storage, and networking capacity.

General-purpose instances

These instance types are best suited for many types of workloads that rely on balanced computing power, memory, and networking resources. They work well for development environments, web servers, and small databases.

Compute-optimized instances

Compute-optimized instances are designed to handle compute-intensive applications with high-performance processors. Their use cases include scientific modeling, batch processing, web servers, and media transcoding.

Memory-optimized instances

This instance type works best for workloads that process large memory data sets. It's often used for big data analysis in real-time, high-performance computing (HPC), and in-memory databases.

Storage-optimized instances

Storage-optimized instances handle workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to large data sets on local storage. They also enable us to deliver a high amount of low-latency, random I/O operations per second. These types of instances can be used for distributed file systems and data warehousing.

Accelerated computing instances

Accelerated computing instances utilize hardware accelerators or co-processors to perform graphic processing or data pattern-matching functions. It allows us to do it more efficiently than CPU software. Its use cases include 3D rendering, gaming, and machine learning.

Use cases for Amazon EC2

The Amazon EC2 service can be used for the following:

• Web servers
• Deployment of applications
• Scaling of applications
• Hybrid cloud environment
• High-performance computing
• Gaming servers
• Processing large memory data sets
• Deployment of machine learning

Many companies, including Adobe, NASA, Netflix, and Disney, use Amazon EC2.

Pricing for Amazon EC2

AWS services are billed using the pay-as-you-go model, which means we only pay for the resources we use. This also applies to EC2. Additionally, if you want to estimate the cost of using EC2, you can use tools like AWS Pricing Calculator.

On-demand instances

This type of pricing plan enables businesses to pay for access to computing capacity when they need it. The fee is charged per hour or second of use. If we stop using the service, the billing will also stop.

Reserved instances

Reserved instances allow us to save up to 72% of the hourly rate when we enter a one-year or three-year contract commitment with AWS. This can help ensure we have reserved capacity in a given availability zone. AWS offers three types of reserved instances: standard, convertible, and scheduled.

Spot instances

Spot instances offer up to a 90% discount compared to on-demand instances. They share the capacity with on-demand instances, meaning that EC2 can reclaim the instance in use with proper notification. If we want to optimize our costs further, we can use them with reserved and on-demand instances. This type of billing is best for machine learning, big data analytics, fault-tolerant applications, flexible workloads, and HPC.

Summary

Amazon EC2 allows us to create virtual machines that can launch applications in the cloud. This cost-effective solution also ensures the high performance of our products.

With EC2, we can ensure our applications' cost-effectiveness, scalability, flexibility, and availability. It makes it possible to maintain and manage our web servers and machine learning apps and scale and deploy them more effectively.

We can control our resource spending thanks to the flexible billing plans and various instance types.

Frequently asked questions

What is Amazon EC2?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a service that enables us to create virtual servers called instances. We can customize instances according to our needs by configuring parameters such as disk storage, operating system, or processor.

How does EC2 benefit businesses?

Thanks to Amazon EC2, businesses can create virtual servers in multiple regions and availability zones. EC2 provides different instance types and resizable compute capacity, which companies can configure according to their applications' requirements. It also ensures high security.

What instance types does EC2 service offer?

EC2 service offers general-purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, storage-optimized, and accelerated computing instances. This wide selection allows us to choose an instance type that will suit our use cases.

What are the use cases of Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2 can be used to set up web servers, databases, hybrid cloud environments, gaming servers, and machine learning, as well as improve scalability and deployment of applications.

What are the pricing plans for EC2?

We can choose from three pricing plans: on-demand instances, reserved instances, and spot instances. They differ in terms of contract length and available capacity.