Amazon AWS EC2

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a web service that provides scalable compute capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. With EC2, you can rent virtual computers to run your own computer applications.

Here are some key points about Amazon EC2:

– **Instances**: EC2 allows you to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. These virtual servers are known as instances.

– **Elasticity**: EC2 provides the ability to scale up or down quickly. This is particularly useful for handling changes in requirements or peaks in popularity, reducing the need to forecast traffic.

– **AMI (Amazon Machine Images)**: AMIs are templates that contain the software configuration (operating system, application server, and applications) required to launch an instance. You can select an AMI provided by AWS, the user community, or through the AWS Marketplace.

– **Regions and Availability Zones**: EC2 is hosted in different geographical regions and availability zones, which are physically isolated from each other. This is important for fault tolerance and reducing latency.

– **Security**: Security on EC2 is handled with security groups, which act as a virtual firewall that controls inbound and outbound traffic.

– **Storage options**: EC2 offers various storage options, including local instance storage and persistent storage volumes (EBS), as well as fully managed and scalable file storage (EFS).

– **Pricing**: There are several pricing options for EC2 instances to meet different use case needs, including On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, and Dedicated Hosts.

Amazon EC2 is typically used for a variety of applications, including websites and web apps, data processing tasks, and for hosting servers, like game servers and databases. It’s a key part of many companies’ cloud infrastructure.