How to Get Started with Amazon EC2

Introduction to EC2

What is EC2, and why is it important?

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2): A web service offering secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

• Benefits:

  • Scalable Infrastructure: Access reliable and scalable infrastructure on demand. Scale capacity within minutes with a 99.99% availability SLA.

  • Security: Built-in security for your applications with the AWS Nitro System.

  • Performance and Cost Optimization: Flexible options like AWS Graviton-based instances, Amazon EC2 Spot instances, and AWS Savings Plans to optimize performance and cost.

EC2 Use Cases

• Compute Infrastructure: Deliver secure, reliable, high-performance, and cost-effective compute infrastructure to meet demanding business needs.

• HPC Applications: Access the on-demand infrastructure and capacity needed to run high-performance computing (HPC) applications faster and more cost-effectively.

• Scalability: Access environments in minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing.

• Machine Learning Projects: Deliver the broadest choice of compute, networking (up to 400 Gbps), and storage services purpose-built to optimize price performance for machine learning projects.

EC2 Instance Types

General Purpose Instances

• Description: Designed to deliver a balance of compute, memory, and network resources.

• Use Cases: Suitable for a wide range of applications including web servers, small databases, development and test environments, and more.

Compute Optimized Instances

• Description: Provide a higher ratio of compute power to memory.

• Use Cases: Excel in workloads that require high-performance processing such as batch processing, scientific modeling, gaming servers, and high-performance web servers.

Memory Optimized Instances

• Description: Designed to handle memory-intensive workloads.

• Use Cases: Suitable for applications that require large amounts of memory, such as in-memory databases, real-time big data analytics, and high-performance computing.

Storage Optimized Instances

• Description: Optimized for applications that require high, sequential read and write access to large datasets.

• Use Cases: Ideal for tasks like data warehousing, log processing, and distributed file systems.

Accelerated Computing Instances

• Description: Typically come with one or more types of accelerators, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), or custom Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs).

• Use Cases: These accelerators offload computationally intensive tasks from the main CPU, enabling faster and more efficient processing for specific workloads.

  

Instance Families

• C – Compute: Optimized for compute-intensive applications.

• D – Dense storage: Ideal for workloads that require high sequential read and write access to large data sets.

• F – FPGA: Designed for use cases that benefit from customizable hardware acceleration.

• G – GPU: Suitable for graphics-intensive applications.

• Hpc – High performance computing: For applications that require high-performance computing resources.

• I – I/O: Optimized for high, random I/O performance.

• Inf – AWS Inferentia: Designed for machine learning inference.

• M – Most scenarios: General-purpose instances for a broad range of applications.

• P – GPU: For general-purpose GPU applications.

• R – Random access memory: Optimized for memory-intensive applications.

• T – Turbo: Designed for burstable performance instances.

• Trn – AWS Tranium: Optimized for training deep learning models.

• U – Ultra-high memory: For extremely memory-intensive applications.

• VT – Video transcoding: Suitable for video processing and transcoding.

• X – Extra-large memory: For applications that require large amounts of memory.

Additional Capabilities

• a – AMD processors: Use AMD processors.

• g – AWS Graviton processors: Use AWS Graviton processors.

• i – Intel processors: Use Intel processors.

• d – Instance store volumes: Include instance store volumes.

• n – Network and EBS optimized: Optimized for enhanced networking and Amazon EBS performance.

• e – Extra storage or memory: Include additional storage or memory.

• z – High performance: Provide high performance.

EC2 Instance Basics

• Virtual Servers: Understanding the concept of virtual servers and instances.

• Key Components: Learn about the key components of an EC2 instance such as AMI (Amazon Machine Image), instance types, and instance states.

• Instance Types: Differentiate between On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot instances.

  Managing EC2 Instances

• Operations: Learn how to start, stop, and terminate instances.

• Monitoring: Monitor instance performance and utilization.

• Access: Basic troubleshooting and accessing instances using SSH (Secure Shell)