What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and How Amazon EC2 Works?
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What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) ?
Amazon EC2 is a service that you can use to gain access to virtual servers. By using EC2 services, you have flexible, cost-effective, and fast computing capacity compared to running your own server in an on-premise data center. Imagine, to activate and run resources on-premise, you need a lot of time and money. Let us describe how the process.
- First, you'll need to do a lot of research to find out what type of server you want to buy and how many are needed.
- After that, you buy it at an upfront cost which is quite draining. Then enter the time-consuming process where you have to wait weeks or even months for the server to become available to you.
- Assume that the server has arrived at the data center building that you own or rent.
- The next step, you need to install, assemble and connect everything.
- Then, make sure the servers are secure and well run, then they are ready to use.
The things above are very tiring and have a very long process, right?. Amazon EC2 services provide secure, scalable compute capacity in the cloud. With Amazon EC2, the process will be much easier. Don't worry! AWS already takes care of the hard parts for you. AWS has built and secured the data center, purchased, built, and installed the server so it's ready for you to use.
AWS continues to operate large amounts of compute capacity so you can use it whenever and wherever you need it for the portion of capacity you need. You just have to make requests for the EC2 instances you want and they're ready in minutes. On AWS, virtual servers are referred to as instances. When you're done using it, you can stop or terminate the instance easily. You no longer have to worry about being stuck with unused servers. You only have to pay according to what you use (pay for what you use), not when the instance stops or ends. Amazon EC2 runs on a host (physical machine) managed by AWS using virtualization technology. When running an instance, you are not using the entire host machine for yourself instead you are sharing the host machine with several other instances. These are known as virtual machines aka virtual machines. The hypervisor is responsible for sharing the underlying physical resources among the virtual machines. It is fully managed by AWS. This idea of sharing underlying hardware is called multitenancy. The hypervisor is also responsible for isolating virtual machines from each other as they share resources from the host. This means that EC2 instances remain secure even if they share resources. One instance will not know the existence of other instances even if they are on the same host. They stay safe and separate from each other.
Amazon EC2 gives you a lot of flexibility and control. Not only can you start a new server or stop it at will, you also have control over its configuration.
For example when you create an EC2 instance. You can choose the OS (operating system) you want, be it Windows or Linux. You can also create thousands of EC2 instances at once with a mix of operating systems and configurations to support your various business applications.
Apart from the OS, you can also install what software you want to run on the instance. Whether it's internal business applications, simple web, complex web, database (database), to third party software such as enterprise software packages. You have complete control over what's in that instance.
EC2 instances are also resizable. You can start by using a small instance (instance of type small).
When the applications you are running start to need more capacity, you can add more memory and CPU. That's called vertical scaling or scaling instances vertically. In essence, you can make the instance bigger or smaller whenever you want.
Not only that. You can also control the networking aspects of EC2, such as what types of requests are allowed or how instances can be accessed (public or private). In the next module we will discuss more about networking.
Again, Amazon EC2 runs with the help of virtualization technology. Maybe you are already familiar with the term virtual machine. Yup! Because this is nothing new.
But AWS makes the server provisioning process easier and more cost-effective through Compute as a Service (CaaS) models like Amazon EC2. With all these advantages, programmers and businesses can innovate faster.
How Amazon EC2 Works
Maybe your brow furrowed a little, "How does Amazon EC2 work?" Unlike servers in data centers that require a long process, Amazon EC2 can be used easily with just a few steps.
Launch
Start by selecting a template with basic configuration for your instance. This basic configuration includes the operating system, application server, or other applications. You can also select the instance type, i.e. the specific hardware configuration of your instance.
While setting up instance launches, define security settings to control the network traffic that can flow into and out of your instance.
Connect
You can connect to an instance in several ways. Your programs and applications have several different methods for connecting and exchanging data directly to instances. You can also connect to the instance by accessing it from the desktop.
Use
Once connected to the instance, you can start using it. There are many things that can be done with an Amazon EC2 instance, such as installing software, increasing storage, copying and organizing files, etc.
