Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
The servers you have access to in AWS are virtual servers. The service used to access these virtual servers is called EC2.
This is a flexible solution to avoid running on-premises solutions. Rather than building your own data centre and creating your own servers, you can use EC2 immediately and scale how many servers you use up and down.
EC2 instances that be spun up and down with a click or two. Only running instances requirement payments, so EC2 instances can be set up but in a shutdown state.
The system runs by using the idea of multitenancy: a solution whereby underlying hardware is shared between several virtual machines, a process orchestrated by a hypervisor.
When provisioning an EC2 instance, we can choose how it is provisioned. There is choice of Operating System, what software runs on the instance - including web apps, databases, etc.
Additionally, EC2 are resizeable, meaning that as an application approaches the limits of a server the instance can be vertically scaled by provisioning it with more memory and CPU capacity.
Lifecycle of AWS EC2
Launch
After selecting a basic template with configurations as a template, we can launch an instance. This configuration includes the OS and other software, as well as the specific hardware of the instance.
We can also specify security settings to control network traffic going in and out of the server.
Connect
Once the instance is running we can connect to it. Either on the application lever using different methods or by logging in and accessing the computer desktop.
Use
After connecting to the instance, we can begin using it to run commands, install software, etc.
AWS EC2 Instance Types
See AWS EC2 Types