Introduction

Amazon EC2 offers servers in the cloud that can run applications.
Its users can efficiently and conveniently grow the ability to compute.
Supports multiple workloads such as web hosting, analytics and enterprise apps.
Provides a variety of instance types as well as storage and networking options.

Because of this reliability on-demand, it is widely adopted in cloud deployment.

Definition

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a cloud based service for running virtual machines on AWS which provide resizable computing capacity. It provides access to configurable computing resources that can be used to run platforms and applications for both deployment (creating) and runtime operations. EC2 makes managing easy for deployment as it provides you with the flexibility to configure your resource, and can add security groups to provide you secure access; as well as localised resources in whatever country you need.

Main Explanation

Working

A chosen AMI is used to form the OS + tools.

Choose an instance type that reflects your CPU/memory needs and performance requirements.

Start the virutal machine in that region and area.

Mount storage volumes with EBS or instance store.

Manage access with security groups and key pairs.

Monitor performance through CloudWatch.

Manually scale your resources, or use Auto Scaling to automate the process.

Only pay for running time of your instances.

Types

General Purpose Instances – balanced CPU, memory and networking.
Compute Optimized – suitable for high performance computation tasks.
Memory-optimised – for heavy in-memory workloads.

Storage-optimized – optimized for storage and I/O infrastructure-intensive workloads.

Accelerated Computing – employs GPUs or FPGAs for compute-intensive workloads.

Burstable Instances – give you a baseline of CPU with the ability to burst above that.

Dedicated Hosts – to put on your compliance hat, or force feed you the licensing pill.

Spot Instances – spare EC2 capacity at discounted rates for both regular and interruption-tolerant workloads.

Steps / Process

Sign in to the AWS Management Console.
Choose the EC2 Service and select an AMI.
Set up the instance type(networking and storage).
Include the security rules and SSH/RDP key pair.

Instance Configuration: Launch the instance and wait until the initialization is complete.

Monitor the performance at the instance and configure scaling.

Suspend, resume or destroy the instance as per demand.

Diagram

A typical graph of EC2 will have:
EC2 Instances representing virtual servers.
AMI showing OS and configurations.
EBS Volumes attached for storage.
Security Groups controlling incoming/outgoing traffic.
VPC & Subnets for network placement.
Use Elastic IP if you require static public addressing.
Connects an auto scaling group for dynamic scaling.

Advantages

Scalable and Dynamic Computing Environment.
Pay-as-you-go pricing reduces cost.
Broad selection of case types for a variety of workloads.
Global availability across AWS regions.
Easily integrate with other aws services.
Secure and customizable networking options.

Disadvantages

Costs could escalate if problems are not controlled.
Requires cloud knowledge for configuration.
Some advanced pricing options can confuse beginners.
Performance may be impacted due to shared infrastructure.
There could be charges for data transfer.

Applications

Website and application hosting.
Big data analytics and the batch processing.
Machine learning model training.
High-performance computing tasks.
Database servers and backend services.
Real-time processing and streaming applications.
Enterprise software deployment.
Development and testing environments.

Conclusion

With Amazon EC2, you can quickly and easily scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Is is suitable for various uses and can be custom set on demand, worldwide. EC2 is still a basic service for modern cloud computing because of its reliability, cost-effectiveness and versatility.

Amazon EC2