Understanding EC2

If you are not aware of the evolution of the cloud from the traditional method I recommend this video to quickly understand what is Cloud and AWS.

EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2 is a virtual machine on AWS.

As per Amazon’s definition “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.”

As we already discussed EC2 is a virtual machine on AWS and now let’s compare it with a Computer. This is just to give an overview of EC2.

What are the main components required to run a computer

Operating System: Here in AWS we have Amazon Machine Images we have different AMIs like Ubuntu, Redhat, Windows, Etc which we can use to run our virtual machines.

CPU: As we have CPUs in normal computers we have Instance Types. We can choose Instance Types based on our requirements.

Harddisk: Here we use EBS to store data related to our EC2 Instance. EBS stands for Elastic Block Storage.

RAM: We have RAM here in EC2 and we can choose it based on our work type or requirement.

Firewall: As we have Firewalls in computers to protect from different viruses or any security threats, here in AWS we have Security Groups.

Network Adaptors: Like network adaptors in our computers which helps us to connect to the Internet here we have IP addressing which uses virtual network adaptors.

Understanding the EC2 Price Model :

There are 3 common types of Billing for EC2

• On-Demand
• Reserved
• Spot

On Demand :

• On-Demand instance type is like pay as you use types.
• Billing is only to the machine running time.
• It is the most expensive.
• We can launch or terminate the machine whenever required.

Reserved :

• Reserved EC2 is used to reserve the machines for the long term like 1 year or 3 years.
• It has special discounts if we choose a reserved option
• Whether you use the machine you will be billed for the whole period whether we use it or not

Spot :

• Using spot we can bid on the pricing of EC2. We will only pay if the amount is equal or less than the bid amount
• If the spot price is more than the bid price then the EC2 instance will be terminated.

Lets discuss in detail about EC2 Components in next article.