One of the core components of AWS is the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. It provides AWS users with the capability to create, run, and manage fleets of virtual machines in the cloud. When running a virtual machine in the AWS cloud we also call it a virtual machine instance or just simply an instance, since it is just one instance of many that have been run from the same virtual machine image.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• EC2 overview
• Instance storage and EBS volumes
• Components of a virtual machine instance
• Connecting instances to the network
• EC2 high availability
• EC2 placement groups
• Configuring security groups for EC2 instances
• Building an EC2 instance in AWS