AWS Crash Course - EC2

We are starting this series on AWS to give you a decent understanding of different AWS services. These will be short articles which you can go through in 15-20 mins everyday.
You can check the complete series here of AWS Crash Course .
Introduction:-

• AWS compute is part of it’s IaaS offerings.
• With compute, you can deploy virtual servers to run your applications.
• Don’t have to wait for days or weeks to get your desired server capacity.
• You can manage the OS or let AWS manage it for you.
• It can be used to build mobile apps or running massive clusters.
• You can even deploy application serverless.
• It provides high fault tolerance.
• Easy scalability and load balancing.
• You are billed as per your usage.

What is EC2?

• EC2 is Elastic Compute Cloud
• It’s VM (virtual machine) in cloud.
• You can commission one or thousands of instances simultaneously, and pay only for what you use, making web-scale cloud computing easy.
• Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change.
• Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate them from common failure scenarios.

What are EC2 pricing models?

• On Demand – Pay by hour no long term commitment.
• Reserved – Yearly reservations up to 75% cheaper compared to On Demand.
• Dedicated – A dedicated Physical server is provided to you. Up to 70% cheaper compared to On Demand.
• Spot – Bid on spare Amazon computing capacity. Up to 90% cheaper compared to On Demand.

EC2 Instance Types:-

• General Purpose (T2, M4 and M3) – Small and mid-size databases
• Compute Optimized (C4 and C3) – High performance front-end fleets, web-servers, batch processing etc.
• Memory Optimized (X1, R4 and R3) – High performance databases, data mining & analysis, in-memory databases
• Accelerated Computing Instances(P2, G2 and F1) – Used for graphic workloads
• Storage Optimized I3 – High I/O Instances – NoSQL databases like Cassandra, MongoDB
• D2 – Dense-storage Instances – Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) data warehousing, MapReduce and Hadoop distributed computing

Check out more details in next section .  AWS Crash Course – VPC
If you want to try some hands on, you can follow this guide to launch Amazon Linux Instance or this for Windows instance.