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Biagio J Mendolia
Biagio J Mendolia

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What is Elastic Compute Cloud?

This week I tackled EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) here is what I learned! EC2 is an AWS service that allows businesses to run application programs in the computing environment. The EC2 can serve as a practically unlimited set of virtual machines!

Mainly, EC2 gives the business the capability to:

  • Rent virtual machines
  • Store data on virtual drives
  • Distribute load across machines
    • Scale the services using an auto-scaling group

An EC2 instance is a virtual server in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for running applications on the Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Network security in an instance is controlled by Security Groups. Security groups control how traffic can move into and out of your EC2 instance. Specifically, they regulate:

  • Access to ports
  • Authorized IP ranges
  • Control of inbound and outbound network

There are a few ways to connect to your EC2 instance. You can SSH into it or use the EC2 Instance Connect provided by AWS. EC2 Instance Connect allows you to connect to your instance within your browser, making it extremely fast and easy to connect.
There are also a large variety of purchasing options for EC2 instances that allow businesses to choose based on what they need! The options are:

  • On demand
  • Reserved
  • Spot instances
  • Dedicated Hosts

I hope you enjoyed this quick summary on EC2 basics that I learned this week, next week I’ll be getting into EC2 instance storage.

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