In the previous chapter, we learnt a lot about how AWS provides top of the line security and access management capabilities to its users in the form of IAM and various other tools.
In this chapter, we will explore one of the most popular and widely used AWS's core services, that is, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This chapter will cover many important aspects about EC2, such as its use cases, its various terms and terminologies, and cost-effective pricing strategies to name a few. It will also show you how to get started with the service using both the AWS Management Console and the AWS CLI; so buckle up and get ready for an awesome time!
Remember the never ending hassles of a long and tedious procurement process? All that time you spent waiting for a brand new server to show up at your doorstep so that you could get started on it? Something we all as sysadmins have gone through. Well, that all changed on August 25, 2006 when Amazon released the first beta version of one of its flagship service offerings called the Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2.
EC2 is a service that basically provides scalable compute capacity on an on-demand, pay-per-use basis to its end users. Let's break it up a bit to understand the terms a bit better. To start with, EC2 is all about server virtualization! And with server virtualization, we get a virtually unlimited capacity of virtual machines or, as AWS calls it, instances. Users can dynamically spin up these instances, as and when required, perform their activity on them, and then shut down the same while getting billed only for the resources they consume.
EC2 is also a highly scalable service, which means that you can scale up from just a couple of virtual servers to thousands in a matter of minutes, and vice versa—all achieved using a few simple clicks of a mouse button! This scalability accompanied by dynamicity creates an elastic platform that can be used for performing virtually any task you can think of! Hence, the term Elastic Compute Cloud! Now that's awesome!
But the buck doesn't just stop there! With virtually unlimited compute capacity, you also get added functionality that helps you to configure your virtual server's network, storage, as well as security. You can also integrate your EC2 environment with other AWS services such as IAM, S3, SNS, RDS, and so on. To provide your applications with add-on services and tools such as security, scalable storage and databases, notification services, and so on and so forth.
Let's have a quick look at some interesting and commonly employed use cases for AWS EC2:
- Hosting environments: EC2 can be used for hosting a variety of applications and software, websites, and even games on the cloud. The dynamic and scalable environment allows the compute capacity to grow along with the application's needs, thus ensuring better quality of service to end users at all times. Companies such as Netflix, Reddit, Ubisoft, and many more leverage EC2 as their application hosting environments.
- Dev/Test environments: With the help of EC2, organizations can now create and deploy large scale development and testing environments with utmost ease. The best part of this is that they can easily turn on and off the service as per their requirements as there is no need for any heavy upfront investments for hardware.
- Backup and disaster recovery: EC2 can be also leveraged as a medium for performing disaster recovery by providing active or passive environments that can be turned up quickly in case of an emergency, thus resulting in faster failover with minimal downtime to applications.
- Marketing and advertisements: EC2 can be used to host marketing and advertising environments on the fly due to its low costs and rapid provisioning capabilities.
- High Performance Computing (HPC): EC2 provides specialized virtualized servers that provide high performance networking and compute power that can be used to perform CPU-intensive tasks such as Big Data analytics and processing. NASA's JPL and Pfizer are some of the companies that employ the use of HPC using EC2 instances.