EC2 Basics

EC2 BASIC

• AMI, Instance type, Network Interface, Storage
• Firewall (Security Group) is required (protocol, port number etc)
• Each instance must be placed in VPC, AZ and subnet.
• Tags can be used to organize
• Encrypted key-pairs are used to manage login auth
• There are limits on number of instances you can have running in a region at any particular time.

Shared tenancy isolation: ————————————

• Multiple customers can share same physical host machine.
• EC2 instances come in different sizes.
• Shared Host resources - Basically the RAM, CPU etc are shared across multiple EC2 (with different customers) and that is done by hypervisor.

AMI —-—

• OS image containing files that are installed so it boots.
• HVM AMIs (Hardware Virtual Machine )
• They can take advance of h/w extensions etc
• PV AMIs (ParaVirtualized instance).
• They can’t take advantage of special h/w extensions such as GPU processing , networking etc.

EC2 types ———————

Number after letter represents the generation of the type.

• M5 - General purpose Balance of compute, memory, network - Midsize DB
• C5 - compute optimized Advanced CPUs - Modelling analytics
• H1 - storage optimized Local HDD storage - Map reduce
• R4 - Memory optimized More RAM - In memory caching
• X1 - Memory Optimized Terabytes RAM - In memory database
• I3 - I/O Optimized Local SSD, high IOPS - NoSQL DB
• G3 - GPU graphics GPUs with encoders - 3d Rendering
• P3 - GPU compute GPUs with tensor cores - Machine learning
• F1 - Accelerated computing FPGA, custom h/w - Genomics
• T2 - Burstable (shared CPU, lowest cost). - Webservers

Elastic IP address (EIP):
———————————

       EIP is static IPv4 address designed for dynamic cloud computing

• EIP is public IPv4 address
• With an EIP you can attach public IP address to an EC2 instance that was created with only private address OR
• Can mask the failure of instance
• Attaching EIP to an instance WILL replace it’s default public IP address for as long as it’s attached.

Three primary ways to access files from the Ec2 instances. ————————————————————————————

SSD - c3, f1, g2, i3,m3, r3, x1 HDD - h1, d2 EBS only - t2, m4, m5, c4, g3, p2, p3, r4

Instance store - SSD mounted in host server (connected to hardware). * Local storage * Can be used as boot or secondary vol * Faster IOPs 3.3 Million read / 1.4 Million write IOPS * Ephemeral data * Once stopped, shutdown - data is erased. * Suitable for paging, swap, caching and replicated NoSQL data.

EBS (Elastic Block Storage)

• They are persistent

• Outside the host machine and EC2 connects over network.

• Only one server will be using it at a time.

• EBS optimized network interface (not the regular one) is used to connect to EBS volume (external).

• EBS volumes can be backed up in S3 (Snapshots).

• SSD

  • GP2 - general purpose (high IOPs - GP2 SSD - 32000 IOPS/volume
    • Use for dev/test and most workloads
    • Base perf = 3 IOPs/GB
    • Bursts up to 3000 IOPS
    • 1G to 16TB
  • IO1 - Provisioned IOPs (io1) - 64000 IOPS /volume

• Hard disk drives

  • ST1 - Throughput optimized
    • Low storage cost
    • Used for frequently accessed, throughput intensive (streaming, big data)
    • Can NOT be boot volume
    • 500G to 16TB
    • EC2 instances have max throughput of 1750 MB/s
  • SC1 - Cold HDD
    • Lowest cost
    • Can NOT be boot volume
    • 500G to 16TB
    • Max throughput of 250MB/s

EFS - Network file share where multiple EC2s can do to NFS mount.

• Can’t use for boot volume.

Security Groups ———————

• One min per EC2 instance.
• More than one can be added to EC2
• Deny all by default.
• 0.0.0.0/0 - From anywhere in the world you can access the EC2 instance. (You don’t want this).

Purchase instances ——————————

• On-demand (standard way)

  • 60 seconds, minimum
  • Licensed, pay by hour (where per second is not indicated)
  • Most expensive option
  • If you turn off during night, can be cheaper

• Reserved

  • Option to reserve capacity, in specific AZ
  • Standard RI ((75% discount)
  • Convertible (54% discount)
  • Scheduled (5-10% discount)
  • 1 or 3 year, you will be charged for that period. If your project is cancelled, you will have to pay.
  • RI marketplace.
    • Like stock market, RI marketplace, you can list there.
    • Customers can buy this RI instance and will be transferred from old leaser to new lease owner.

• Spot Instances

  • Spot price is price you pay for instance, that is based on supply and demand.
  • This is like stock market.
  • Put a request for spot for max price you are willing to pay. Can fluctuate based on demand and supply.
  • If you don’t want to be interrupted, request something called “Spot Block”.
  • Fixed discount and depending on time of day and number of hours, just have block.
    • Use case like batch processing, EMR task nodes, compute intensive simulations
    • EMR map reduce (Hadoop cluster) to process data.

• Consolidated billing (Just a billing way), not type of purchase.

  • If there are multiple accounts, one account who has RI can be used by another account in same organization.
  • No money is lost at Org level.

Between on-demand and RI , there is a break-even point. Use the calculator to get some good ratio.

EFS Essentials ———————

• EFS is elastic file system.
• Can be shared by more than one EC2 instance.
• No need to worry about storage capacity.
• Petabyte scale FS. You pay by how many GB you are going to store/use.
• Only compatible with Ec2 instance that run Linux.
  • EFSFilesync - local file system to EFS (tool provided by AWS).
• Can provide multiple mount points in multiple AZ.
• Burst network perf up to 100 MB/s
• Can encrypt at rest using AWS Key Magmt Service (KMS) - This is server side encryption.
• When to use?
  • Big data and Analytics
  • Media processing workflows
  • Web servicing and content management