Glen Knight

NYC Based IT Professional

AWS EC2 Overview

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity int he cloud. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change.

EC2 Options

On Demand – Allows you to pay a fixed rate by the hour with no commitment.

    • * Users that want the low cost and flexibility of Amazon EC2 without any up-front payment or long-term commitment.

 

    • * Applications with short term, spiky, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted.

 

    • * Applications being developed or tested on Amazon EC2 for the first time.

 

Reserved – provide you with a capacity reservation, and offer a significant discount not eh hourly charge for an instance 1 year or 3 year terms.

    • * Applications with steady state or predictable usage

 

    • * Applications that require reserved capacity

 

    • * Users able to make upfront payments to reduce their total computing costs even further

 

Spot – enable you to bid whatever price you want for instance capacity, providing for even greater savings if your applications have flexible start and end times.

    • * Applications that have flexible start and end times

 

    • * Applications that are only feasible at very low compute prices

 

    • * Users with urgent computing needs for large amounts of additional capacity

 

    • * If you terminate the instance, you pay for the hour, but if AWS does, you get the hour for free.

 

Dedicated Hosts – Physical EC2 server dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses.

    • * Useful for regulatory requirements that may not support multi tenant virtualization.

 

    • * Great for licensing which does not support multi tenancy or cloud deployments

 

    • * Can be purchases On-Demand(hourly)

 

Instance Type Examples –

    • * D2 – Dense Storage – File Servers/Data Warehousing/Hadoop

 

    • * R4 – Memory Optimized – Memory Intensive Apps/DBs

 

    • * M4 – General Purpose – Application Servers

 

    • * C4 – Compute Optimized – CPU Intensive Apps/DBs

 

    • * G2 – Graphics Intensive – Video Encoding/3D Application Streaming

 

    • * I2 – High Speed Storage – NoSQL Das, Data Warehousing, etc

 

    • * F1 – Field Programmable Gate Array – Hardware acceleration for your code

 

    • * T2 – Lowest Cost, General Purpose – Web Servers/Small DBs

 

    • * P2 – Graphics/General Purpose GPU – Machine Learning, Bit Coin Mining, etc

 

    • * X1 – Memory Optimized – SAP HANA/Apache Spark etc

 

Termination Protection is turned off by default, you must turn it on.

On an EBS-backed instance, the default action is for the root EBS volume to be deleted when the instance is terminated.

EBS Root Volumes of your DEFAULT AMI’s cannot be encrypted. You can also use a third party tool(such as bit locker, etc) to encrypt the root volume, or this can be done when creating AMI’s in the AWS console or using the API.

Additional volumes can be encrypted.

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