EC2 Storage

AWS Elastic Cloud Compute – EC2

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 9 Comments

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 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.
  1. What are the Amazon EC2 API tools?
    1. They don’t exist. The Amazon EC2 AMI tools, instead, are used to manage permissions.
    2. Command-line tools to the Amazon EC2 web service
    3. They are a set of graphical tools to manage EC2 instances.
    4. They don’t exist. The Amazon API tools are a client interface to Amazon Web Services.
  2. 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?
    1. Proceed without the key pair
    2. Upload a new key pair
    3. Select an existing key pair
    4. Create a new key pair