EC2 Basics¶

EC2 is one of the most popular of AWS' offerings. It stands for Elastic Compute Cloud, is used for Infrastructure as a Service on AWS.

It mainly consists of capability of: - Renting virtual machines (EC2) - Storing data on virtual drives (EBS volumes) - Distributing load accross machines (ELB - Elastic Load Balancer) - 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's possible to bootstrap our instances using an EC2 User data script. This means launching commands when a machine starts on the first launch of the instance.

EC2 user data is used to automate boot tasks like: - Installing updates - Installing software - Downloading common files from the internet

One thing to remember is that the EC2 data script runs with the root user.

EC2 instance types: example¶

The t2.micro is part of the AWS free tier (up to 750 hours per month).