ec2.md

What is Amazon EC2?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

• EC2 is one of the most popular of AWS’ offering
• EC2 = Elastic Compute Cloud = Infrastructure as a Service
• It mainly consists in the capability of :
  • Renting virtual machines (EC2)
  • Storing data on virtual drives (EBS)
  • Distributing load across machines (ELB)
  • Scaling the services using an auto-scaling group (ASG)
• Knowing EC2 is fundamental to understand how the Cloud works

EC2 sizing & configuration options

• Operating System (OS): Linux, Windows or Mac OS
• How much compute power & cores (CPU)
• How much random-access memory (RAM)
• How much storage space:
  • Network-attached (EBS & EFS)
  • hardware (EC2 Instance Store)
• Network card: speed of the card, Public IP address
• Firewall rules: security group
• Bootstrap script (configure at first launch): EC2 User Data

EC2 User Data

• It is possible to bootstrap our instances using an EC2 User data script.
• bootstrapping means launching commands when a machine starts
• That script is only run once at the instance first start
• EC2 user data is used to automate boot tasks such as:
  • Installing updates
  • Installing software
  • Downloading common files from the internet
  • Anything you can think of
• The EC2 User Data Script runs with the root user

EC2 Instance Types - Overview

• You can use different types of EC2 instances that are optimised for different use cases (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/)

  • General Purpose
  • Compute Optimized
  • Memory Optimized
  • Storage Optimized
  • Accelerated Computing

• AWS has the following naming convention: m5.2xlarge

• m: instance class

• 5: generation (AWS improves them over time)

• 2xlarge: size within the instance class

General Purpose

• Great for a diversity of workloads such as web servers or code repositories
• Balance between:
  • Compute
  • Memory
  • Networking

Compute Optimized

• Great for compute-intensive tasks that require high performance processors:
  • Batch processing workloads
  • Media transcoding
  • High performance web servers
  • High performance computing (HPC)
  • Scientific modeling & machine learning
  • Dedicated gaming servers

Memory Optimized

• Fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory
• Use cases:
  • High performance, relational/non-relational databases
  • Distributed web scale cache stores
  • In-memory databases optimized for BI (business intelligence)
  • Applications performing real-time processing of big unstructured data

Storage Optimized

• Great for storage-intensive tasks that require high, sequential read and write access to large data sets on local storage
• Use cases:
  • High frequency online transaction processing (OLTP) systems
  • Relational & NoSQL databases
  • Cache for in-memory databases (for example, Redis)
  • Data warehousing applications
  • Distributed file systems

Introduction to Security Groups

• Security Groups are the fundamental of network security in AWS
• They control how traffic is allowed into or out of our EC2 Instances.
• Security groups only contain allow rules
• Security groups rules can reference by IP or by security group