EC2 Instance

Everybody’s favorite AWS Service

What is an AWS instance ?

An instance is a virtual server in the AWS Cloud. With Amazon EC2, you can set up and configure the operating system and applications that run on your instance.Amazon EC2 provides a wide selection of instance types optimized to fit different use cases. Instance types comprise varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity and give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your applications. Each instance type includes one or more instance sizes, allowing you to scale your resources to the requirements of your target workload.

General Purpose Instances

These instances provide a balance of memory ,compute, networking and can be used for a variety of diverse workloads.EC2 Mac instances allows you to run on demand Mac-OS workloads in the cloud , scalability and cost-benefits to all the developers using EC2 Mac instances, you can create apps for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari. Use cases building ,testing,tvOS and WatchOS applications, MacOS.

Accelerated Computing

This instances uses hardware accelerators or even co-processors. Amazon EC2 P4 instances(for more info https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/p4/)are the latest generation of GPU-based instances and provide highest performance for machine learning training and high performance computing in the cloud.Use cases Machine Learning ,speech recognition,autonomous vehicles and drug discovery.

Compute Optimized

These are ideal for compute bound applications that benefit from high performance processors. Mostly prefered by dedicated gaming servers and server engines and other very high computing applications.

Memory Optimized

Basically used to enhance delivery of applications . Mostly used in high intensive datasets. Used in NoSQl ,SQL databases,SAP workloads.

Features of EC2 instances

1. Pre-configured templates for your instances (known as Amazon Machine Images — AMIs)
2. Storage volumes of temporary data is deleted when you stop or terminate your instance (known as instance store volumes)
3. Allow configuration at ELB to redirect to custom URL for specified response codes from the application server nodes.
4. There are various Amazon’s Elastic IP addresses that can be associated with the instances that are used in the EC2 instances.
5. There are many applications that are deployed on AWS, so this service helps in monitoring those AWS cloud services. The services provided by Cloud Watch include the analysis, collection, and storing of historical as well as real time performance data.

AWS is currently offering 400 different instances with choices across storage operations and networking .