An Overview of EC2 Instances

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EC2 Instance

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is an AWS service that lets you rent virtual servers called instances to run your applications in the cloud. These instances act as virtual machines, providing scalable computing power without the need to manage physical hardware.

What's an EC2 Instance?

EC2 instances are virtual machines that operate on AWS's cloud infrastructure.
Adding or removing instances is just one of the many features that allow you to scale your resources up and down with ease.
·With on-demand pricing that requires payment, you'll only be charged for the computation time you spend.

Core Components of an EC2 Instance

Amazon Machine Image (AMI): The software blueprint that includes the operating system and any preconfigured applications.
Instance Type: Specifies the hardware resources such as CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity.
Key Pair: Used to securely access the instance through SSH or RDP.
Storage (EBS or Instance Store): Provides either persistent or temporary storage attached to the instance.
Security groups act as virtual firewalls that control both incoming and outgoing traffic for your instance.

EC2 Instance Categories

Amazon EC2 instance categories are predefined virtual server configurations in AWS that define the available combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources.

EC2 Instance Categories

General Purpose: Offer a balanced mix of compute, memory, and networking. Ideal for workloads that use these resources evenly, such as web servers, application servers, and code repositories.

Compute Optimized: Built for compute-intensive tasks that require high-performance processors. Suitable for batch processing, media transcoding, HPC workloads, scientific modeling, gaming servers, ad engines, and machine learning inference.

Memory Optimized: Designed for workloads that need fast performance when handling large datasets in memory.

Storage Optimized: Intended for workloads that require high sequential read/write performance on local storage. These instances deliver very high IOPS with low latency for large datasets.
Accelerated Computing: Use specialized hardware accelerators or co-processors to handle tasks such as floating-point calculations, graphics processing, or pattern matching more efficiently than traditional CPUs.

EC2 Instance Lifecycle

Launch: Select the AMI, instance type, storage, networking settings, and key pair to start an instance.
Running: The instance is active and available for use.
Stop/Start: You can stop the instance and restart it later; attached EBS volumes remain intact.
Terminate: The instance is permanently deleted; EBS volumes can be retained if configured.