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AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - Quick Notes


Bhaskar S *UPDATED*12/14/2023


AWS Elastic Compute Cloud


AWS Elastic Compute Cloud, also referred to as EC2, is a cloud service that provides a secure and auto scalable compute capacity in the cloud.

The following is the summary of the various features/capabilities of EC2:

EC2 Instance Types

AWS provides a large variety of EC2 Instance Types to choose from based on one's workload needs.

EC2 provides the following types of instances:

Type Description
General Purpose Provides a balance of compute, memory and networking resources, that can be used for a variety of general workloads
Compute Optimized Suitable for compute bound applications that benefit from high performance processors, that can be used for batch processing, media transcoding, high performance computing (HPC), machine learning, etc
Memory Optimized Delivers fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory
Storage Optimized Designed for workloads that demand fast access, low latency I/O operations for processing large data sets
Accelerated Computing Make use hardware accelerators or graphical processing units (GPUs), that can be used for demanding workloads such as high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence, etc

EC2 Purchasing Options

EC2 provides the following Purchasing Options for Instances:

On-Demand

Savings Plan

Reserved

Spot

Dedicated Hosts

Dedicated Instances

EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet

EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet allow a user to launch a group of compute Instances on AWS.

The following are some of the features:

Elastic IP Address

Elastic IP is a public static IPv4 address that can be assigned to a single Instance.

The following are some of the features:

Placement Groups

For certain workloads that have a need for a group of interdependent Instances, one can create a Placement Group and attach it to Instances to influence their placement.

The following are the three types of Placement Groups:

Cluster

Spread

Partition

Elastic Network Interfaces

Elastic Network Interface is a logical networking component and represents a virtual network interface card.

The following are some of the features:

Security Groups

A Security Group behaves like a virtual firewall in EC2 Instances and controls incoming and outgoing network traffic.

The following are some of the features:

EC2 Instance Store

EC2 Instance Store is an ephemeral, high-performance physical hardware storage disk which can be attached to an Instance.

The following are some of the features:


References

Official AWS EC2 Documentation

Official AWS EC2 Instance Types

Official AWS EC2 FAQs


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