Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Using Amazon EC2 eliminates your need to invest in hardware up front, so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing your need to forecast traffic.

Features of Amazon EC2:

Amazon EC2 provides the following features:

·         Virtual computing environments, known as instances

·         Preconfigured templates for your instances, known as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), that package the bits you need for your server (including the operating system and additional software)

·         Various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity for your instances, known as instance types

·         Secure login information for your instances using key pairs (AWS stores the public key, and you store the private key in a secure place)

·         Storage volumes for temporary data that's deleted when you stop or terminate your instance, known as instance store volumes

·         Persistent storage volumes for your data using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), known as Amazon EBS volumes

·         Multiple physical locations for your resources, such as instances and Amazon EBS volumes, known as regions and Availability Zones

·         A firewall that enables you to specify the protocols, ports, and source IP ranges that can reach your instances using security groups

·         Static IPv4 addresses for dynamic cloud computing, known as Elastic IP addresses

·         Metadata, known as tags, that you can create and assign to your Amazon EC2 resources

·         Virtual networks you can create that are logically isolated from the rest of the AWS cloud, and that you can optionally connect to your own network, known as virtual private clouds(VPCs)

 

Benefits of Amazon EC2:

 Elastic Web-Scale Computing

Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.

Completely Controlled

You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. You can stop your instance while retaining the data on your boot partition and then subsequently restart the same instance using web service APIs. Instances can be rebooted remotely using web service APIs. You also have access to console output of your instances.

Flexible Cloud Hosting Services

You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application. For example, your choice of operating systems includes numerous Linux distributions, and Microsoft Windows Server.

Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services

Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.

Reliable

Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters.

Secure

Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your compute resources. Your compute instances are located in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with an IP range that you specify. You decide which instances are exposed to the Internet and which remain private.

·         Security Groups and networks ACLs allow you to control inbound and outbound network access to and from your instances.

·         You can provision your EC2 resources as Dedicated Instances. Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 Instances that run on hardware dedicated to a single customer for additional isolation.

·         If you do not have a default VPC you must create a VPC and launch instances into that VPC to leverage advanced networking features such as private subnets, outbound security group filtering, network ACLs and Dedicated Instances.

Inexpensive

Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume.

·         On-Demand Instances – On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs. On-Demand Instances also remove the need to buy “safety net” capacity to handle periodic traffic spikes.

·         Reserved Instances – Reserved Instances provide you with a significant discount compared to On-Demand Instance pricing. There are three Reserved Instance payment options (No Upfront, Partial Upfront, All Upfront) that enable you to balance the amount you pay upfront with your effective hourly price.

·         Spot Instances -  Spot instances are spare compute capacity in the AWS cloud available to you at steep discounts compared to On-Demand prices. EC2 Spot enables you to optimize your costs on the AWS cloud and scale your application's throughput up to 10X for the same budget. By simply selecting Spot when launching EC2 instances, you can save up-to 90% on On-Demand prices.

·         Dedicated Hosts - An Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you address compliance requirements and reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses including Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server,Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or other software licenses that are bound to VMs, sockets, or physical cores, subject to your license terms.

Easy to Start

Quickly get started with Amazon EC2 by visiting the AWS Management Console to choose preconfigured software on Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You can quickly deploy this software to EC2 via the EC2 console.

Amazon EC2 Functionality

Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to launch instances with a variety of operating systems, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.

To use Amazon EC2, you simply:

·         Select a pre-configured, templated Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to get up and running immediately. Or create an AMI containing your applications, libraries, data, and associated configuration settings.

·         Configure security and network access on your Amazon EC2 instance.

·         Choose which instance type(s) you want, then start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs or the variety of management tools provided.

·         Determine whether you want to utilize static IP endpoints or attach persistent block storage to your instances.

·         Pay only for the resources that you actually consume, like instance-hours or data transfer.