Day 1 โ€“ Cloud Computing & EC2 Deep Dive | DevOps Learning Log

AkankshaAkanksha
2 min read

๐Ÿ”น Cloud Computing Basics

What Is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services (servers, storage, networking, databases, etc.) over the internet on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Why Cloud?

  • Elasticity: Scale resources up/down automatically

  • Cost-Effective: No capex, pay for what you use

  • Global Reach: Deploy in multiple regions

  • High Availability: Redundancy via Availability Zones

  • Speed: Provision resources within minutes


๐Ÿ”น Cloud Models

Service Models:

  • IaaS (e.g., EC2): Manage OS and everything on top

  • PaaS (e.g., Elastic Beanstalk): Just to deploy code

  • SaaS (e.g., Gmail): Fully managed end-user apps

Deployment Models:

  • Public Cloud (AWS, GCP)

  • Private Cloud (on-prem, VMware)

  • Hybrid Cloud (combo of both)


๐Ÿ”น AWS Overview

  • AWS = Most widely adopted cloud platform

  • Regions = Geographical locations (e.g., ap-south-1)

  • Availability Zones (AZs) = Isolated data centers within a region

  • Edge Locations = Used by CloudFront for CDN caching


๐Ÿ”น EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

Core Concepts

  • AMI (Amazon Machine Image): Pre-configured OS + software

  • Instance Types: Compute configs (vCPU, RAM, etc.)

  • Pricing Models:

    • On-Demand: Pay per hour/second

    • Reserved: 1-3 year commitment, discounted

    • Spot: Up to 90% cheaper, but can be interrupted

    • Savings Plan: Flexible savings commitment

  • Networking:

    • Public IP: Dynamic, changes on stop/start

    • Private IP: Stays within VPC

    • Elastic IP: Static public IP you can remap

  • Instance Lifecycle: pending โ†’ running โ†’ stopped/terminated

  • Placement Groups:

    • Cluster: Low latency, high throughput

    • Spread: Instances on separate racks

    • Partition: Split across partitions for failure isolation

  • Security Group: Stateful firewall at instance level

  • Key Pair: SSH authentication (PEM file used to connect)


๐Ÿ”น Hands-On Summary

Launched an EC2 instance using:

  • Ubuntu 22.04 AMI

  • t2.micro (free tier)

  • Custom security group (allow SSH from my IP)

  • Connected via SSH using .pem key

  • Terminated the instance post-use

Also tested:

  • Elastic IP allocation & reassignment

  • Instance stop/start behavior on public IP

1
Subscribe to my newsletter

Read articles from Akanksha directly inside your inbox. Subscribe to the newsletter, and don't miss out.

Written by

Akanksha
Akanksha