What is Amazon EC2 and how does it work

Trying to find a flexible and scalable solution to meet your computing needs? Amazon EC2, Elastic Compute Cloud, is the perfect solution. It’s a flexible, scalable, and cost-effective cloud service with endless possibilities for your business. EC2 is the top solution for hosting applications and managing virtual servers in the cloud. In this blog post, we are going to explain what makes Amazon EC2 so great.

Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) offers on-demand, scalable computing power in the AWS Cloud. Using Amazon EC2 reduces hardware costs so you can develop and deploy applications faster. Launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, with the ability to configure security, networking, and manage storage efficiently. Scale up to handle compute-intensive tasks or traffic spikes, and scale down when demand decreases, ensuring optimal flexibility and cost-efficiency.

EC2 is not just one service. It’s composed of many things at a high level.

1. You can rent virtual machines on EC2, they’re called EC2 instances.
2. You can store data on virtual drives or EBS volumes.
3. You can distribute load across machines, Elastic Load Balancer (ELB).
4. You can scale services using an auto-scaling group (ASG).

EC2 instances are virtual servers running on Amazon’s physical hardware in their data centers. This virtualization technology allows Amazon to efficiently utilize hardware, providing customers with flexible and scalable computing capacity. Multiple instances can run on the same physical server through virtualization, offering a cost-effective solution for various computing needs.

Amazon EC2 instances are virtual servers that run on physical servers. Amazon uses a hypervisor to manage these virtual resources. Each physical server can support multiple virtual servers, known as instances. This virtualization technology enables Amazon to efficiently use the hardware, offering flexible and scalable computing resources to customers.

Amazon provides various instance types with different combinations of CPU, storage, memory, and networking capacity. Customers can select the instance type that best fits their workload requirements.

Elasticity is one of Amazon EC2’s key features. Customers can easily scale their computing capacity up or down according to their workload requirements. They can launch new instances, terminate existing ones, or change instance types to adapt to changing requirements.

EC2 instances can be deployed in different regions worldwide. Each region has multiple Availability Zones, which are physically separate data centers within the same region. Deploying instances across multiple Availability Zones helps achieve high availability and fault tolerance.

EC2 instances are connected to the internet through Amazon’s network infrastructure. Every instance has a private IP address for internal communication within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and a public IP address for external communication. Customers can create security groups and network access control lists that manage inbound and outbound traffic.

EC2 instances can be attached to various storage types, including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes and Amazon S3 buckets. EBS volumes offer persistent block-level storage for EC2 instances, while S3 buckets are used for object storage.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud offers a wide range of instance types to suit various computing needs. These instances are classified into different categories based on their specific attributes such as processing power, memory capacity, and network performance. 

What does that mean?

• m is Instance Class. 
• 5 is a generation of the instance. (AWS improve them over time)
• 2xlarge represented the size within the instance class. It starts as small and then large and then 2xlarge, 4xlarge and so on. It represents the size of the instance, and the more the size is, the more the memory the more the CPU is going to have on your instance.

There are different types of EC2 instances that you can use for different use cases and they have different types of optimization.

General purpose instances provide a balance of compute, memory and networking resources, and can be used for a variety of diverse workloads. They are ideal for applications that use these resources in equal proportions such as web servers and code repositories.

Compute-optimized instances are ideal for compute bound applications that benefit from high-performance processors. Instances in this category are well suited for batch processing workloads, media transcoding, high-performance web servers and computing (HPC), scientific modeling, dedicated gaming servers and ad server engines, machine learning inference and other compute intensive applications.

Memory-optimized instances are designed to deliver fast performance for workload requirements that process large data sets in memory.

Accelerated computing instances use hardware accelerators, or co-processors, to perform functions, such as floating point number calculations, graphics processing, or data pattern matching, more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs.

Storage-optimized instances are designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to very large data sets on local storage. They are optimized to deliver tens of thousands of low-latency, random I/O operations per second (IOPS) to applications.

High performance computing (HPC) instances are purpose built to offer the best price performance for running HPC workloads at scale on AWS. HPC instances are ideal for applications that benefit from high-performance processors such as large, complex simulations and deep learning workloads.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps keep your applications running smoothly by automatically adding or removing EC2 instances based on your needs. Dynamic or predictive scaling policies let you add or remove EC2 instance capacity to service established or real-time demand patterns. The fleet management features of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling help maintain the health and availability of your fleet.

Adding Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to your infrastructure is one way to maximize the benefits of the AWS Cloud. When you use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, your applications gain the following benefits:

• Improve fault tolerance through automatic detection and replacement of unhealthy instances.
• Increase availability with predictive or dynamic scaling policies with the right amount of compute capacity.
• Optimize workload performance and cost by combining purchase options and instance types.
• Reduce the complexity of configuration changes and application deployments with instance refresh.

There are numerous benefits to using EC2 for your computing needs. Let’s take a closer look at some of them:

Amazon EC2 provides high-performance computing capabilities that enable you to run resource-intensive applications without any slowdowns or disruptions. Its powerful processors and customizable configurations allow for efficient processing of complex workloads. With Amazon EC2’s user-friendly interface and tools such as Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), managing resources becomes effortless even for those without technical expertise in cloud computing.

If you need additional help with this, or if you are interested in a fully managed AWS infrastructure, feel free to contact us. We’ll gladly help you out!