EC2: The AWS Compute Service

Have you ever considered working from any place in the world, whether it is your home or another location? Isn’t it fascinating? It is feasible with Amazon EC2. You can work from your home or any other location while maintaining a secure and safe IT environment. You do not have to be concerned about the hardware system or manage anything.

AWS provides a broad range of services in areas such as compute, storage, database, migration, network, management tools, media services, security, business productivity, application integration, machine learning, game creation, and more. EC2 is included in the compute capacity category.

In this article, we will dive deeper into what the AWS EC2 service is all about.

What is EC2: The AWS Compute Service?

Amazon EC2 or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a web service that seeks to make developers’ lives easier by providing secure and scalable cloud computing resources. In general terms, EC2 allows users to rent virtual computers that are known as virtual machines on which they can execute their computer applications.

Rather than purchasing and connecting your own hardware, Amazon provides you with practically unlimited virtual machines on which you can execute your apps while they handle the hardware.

It is effortless to scale up and down our infrastructure based on demand using EC2. This service can be linked easily with practically all of Amazon’s services, and the most significant part may be that we only pay for what we use.

Benefits of EC2:

Below are a few of the advantages of using EC2.

• AWS EC2 does not require any hardware components, hardware management, or physical hardware provisioning.
• It is quite simple to scale up and down our infrastructure in response to demand.
• The EC2 service works well with practically all of Amazon’s services.
• We do not have to commit upfront, and we only pay for what we have used.
• It can be accessed from any location in the world like any other cloud service.
• Users can have complete control from their end.
• It provides a wide range of operating systems to choose from.
• It speeds up the deployment of new servers.

Components of EC2: The AWS Compute Service

• Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs): They are virtual networks that you can create that are conceptually isolated from the other part of the AWS cloud and can optionally connect to your own network.
• Instances: They are virtual computing environments.
• Amazon Machine Images (AMIs): They are the set of pre-configured templates for your instances that bundle the components you will need for your server.
• Amazon EBS volumes: They are Amazon Elastic Block Store-based persistent storage volumes for your data.
• Instance types: They are the numerous CPU, memory, storage, and networking configurations for your instances.
• Key pairs: They provide secure login information for your instances.
• Instance store volumes: They are temporary data storage volumes that are erased when your instance is stopped, hibernated, or terminated.
• Security Groups: Using Security Groups, you may decide which protocols, ports, and source IP ranges are allowed to access your instances.

You can refer to the given link to get an overview of the AWS Security Groups:

• Elastic IP addresses: They are the static IPv4 addresses for dynamic cloud computing.
• Tags: They are a type of metadata that you can add to your Amazon EC2 resources.
• Regions and Availability Zones: They are physical locations for the resources, such as instances and Amazon EBS volumes.

How does EC2 work?

EC2 is incredibly simple to set up and operate. The first step in the EC2 setup process is creating or choosing an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which comprises an operating system, applications, and customizations. The AMI is then uploaded to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and registered with EC2, allowing customers to launch virtual machines whenever they need them.

Rather than providing you with a physical server, AWS automatically creates a new Virtual Machine (VM) instance. These compute services can also be used to execute High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications. HPC demands more storage I/O and ample amounts of memory to complete a complex operation.

Amazon provides many EC2 instance types for various needs and budgets, including hourly, reserved, and spot prices.

How can InfosecTrain help?

Cloud computing will significantly improve your business performance, and you can do this quickly and safely with Amazon EC2. You will also benefit from the tremendous economies of scale it offers, which means you will not have to guess at consumption capacity and, as a result, will save money on infrastructure, all on a pay-as-you-go basis. So, now is the correct time to advance your AWS cloud computing journey. If you want to learn more about Amazon EC2 and how it supports other services in the AWS cloud, you may enroll in InfosecTrain’s AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate training course. Moreover, the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner training course is an excellent place to start if you are new to AWS.

AUTHOR
Monika Kukreti ( )
Infosec Train

“ Monika Kukreti holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering. She is a voracious reader and a keen learner. She is passionate about writing technical blogs and articles. Currently, she is working as a content writer with InfosecTrain. “