Amazon EC2

• EC2 = Elastic Compute Cloud = Infrastructure as 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)

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 rulesL securtiy group
• Boostrap script (configure at first launch) : EC2 User Data

EC2 User Data

• It is possible to bootstrap our instances using an EC2 User data script
• bootstrappinp means launching commands when a machine starts
• That script is only run once at the instance first start
  • 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

• AWS has the following naming convention:
  • e.g. m5.2xlarge
  • m: instance calss
  • 5: generation(AWS improves them over time)
  • 2xlarge: size within the instance class

General Purpose

• Great for a diversity of worklads such as web servers or code repositories
• Balance between:
  • Compute
  • Memory
  • Networking
• t2.micro is a General Purpose EC2 instance

Compute Optimized (C type)

• Great for compute-intesive tasks that require high performance processors:
  • Batch processing workloads
  • Media transcoding
  • High performance web servers
  • High performance computing (HPC)

Memory Optimized (R type)

• Fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory
• Use cases:
  • High performance, relastional/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 (i/D type)

• Great for storage-intensive tasks that require high, sequential read and write access to large data sets on local storage