EC2 Instances

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure and resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make it easy for you to launch instances and configure them with the appropriate storage, network, and security settings. Amazon EC2 instances can run a wide variety of operating systems and applications, making them a great choice for a variety of workloads.

Building Blocks of an Instance

An Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance is a virtual server in the cloud that you can use to host your applications. Amazon EC2 instances are built on top of the Xen hypervisor, which allows you to run multiple operating systems on a single server.

Each Amazon EC2 instance has a number of attributes, including:

• Instance type: The type of instance that you are launching. Instance types vary in terms of CPU, memory, and storage capacity.
• Operating system: The operating system that you want to run on your instance. Amazon EC2 supports a variety of operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and macOS.
• Region: The region in which you want to launch your instance. Amazon EC2 regions are located all over the world.
• Availability Zone: The Availability Zone in which you want to launch your instance. Availability Zones are subsets of regions that provide fault tolerance for Amazon EC2 instances.
• Security group: The security group that you want to use to protect your instance. Security groups allow you to control the inbound and outbound traffic to your instances.
• Storage: The type and amount of storage that you want to attach to your instance. Amazon EC2 supports a variety of storage options, including EBS volumes, instance store volumes, and ephemeral storage.
• Network: The network that you want to use to connect your instance. Amazon EC2 supports a variety of network options, including public and private subnets.

Launching an Instance