Elastic Cloud Compute – EC2 Overview
- Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
- EC2 eliminates the need to invest in hardware up front, so applications can be developed and deployed faster.
- EC2 can be used to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage.
- EC2 enables you to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing your need to forecast traffic.
EC2 features
- Virtual computing environments, known as EC2 instances
- Preconfigured templates for your instances, known as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), that package the bits you need for your server (including the operating system and additional software)
- Various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity for your instances, known as Instance types
- Secure login information for your instances using key pairs (AWS stores the public key, and you store the private key in a secure place)
- Storage volumes for temporary data that’s deleted when you stop or terminate your instance, known as Instance store volumes
- Persistent storage volumes for your data using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), known as Amazon EBS volumes
- Multiple physical locations for your resources, such as instances and EBS volumes, known as Regions and Availability Zones
- A firewall that enables you to specify the protocols, ports, and source IP ranges that can reach your instances using security groups
- Static IP addresses for dynamic cloud computing, known as Elastic IP addresses
- Metadata, known as tags, can be created and assigned to EC2 resources
Accessing EC2
- Amazon EC2 console
- Amazon EC2 console is the web-based user interface which can be accessed from AWS management console
- AWS Command line Interface (CLI)
- Provides commands for a broad set of AWS products, and is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
- Amazon EC2 Command Line Interface (CLI) tools
- Provides commands for Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, and Amazon VPC, and is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux
- AWS Tools for Windows Powershell
- Provides commands for a broad set of AWS products for those who script in the PowerShell environment
- AWS Query API
- Query API allows for requests are HTTP or HTTPS requests that use the HTTP verbs GET or POST and a Query parameter named Action
- AWS SDK libraries
- AWS provide libraries in various languages which provide basic functions that automate tasks such as cryptographically signing your requests, retrying requests, and handling error responses
Additional Reading
- AWS EC2 Amazon Machine Image
- AWS EC2 Instance Types
- AWS EC2 Instance Purchase Options
- AWS EC2 Instance Lifecycle
- AWS EC2 Storage
- AWS EC2 VM Import/Export
- AWS EC2 Network
- AWS EC2 Security
- AWS EC2 Best Practices
- AWS EC2 Monitoring
- AWS EC2 Troubleshooting
AWS Certification Exam Practice Questions
- Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
- AWS services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
- AWS exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with AWS updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
- Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.
- What are the Amazon EC2 API tools?
- They don’t exist. The Amazon EC2 AMI tools, instead, are used to manage permissions.
- Command-line tools to the Amazon EC2 web service
- They are a set of graphical tools to manage EC2 instances.
- They don’t exist. The Amazon API tools are a client interface to Amazon Web Services.
- When a user is launching an instance with EC2, which of the below mentioned options is not available during the instance launch console for a key pair?
- Proceed without the key pair
- Upload a new key pair
- Select an existing key pair
- Create a new key pair