EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

1. Overview

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It's designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

Key features:

  • Scalable virtual servers in the cloud

  • Complete control of your computing resources

  • Reduced time required to obtain and boot new server instances

  • Pay only for the capacity you actually use

2. EC2 Instance Types

EC2 offers a wide variety of instance types optimized for different use cases:

  • General Purpose (e.g., T3, M5)

  • Compute Optimized (e.g., C5)

  • Memory Optimized (e.g., R5)

  • Storage Optimized (e.g., I3, D2)

  • Accelerated Computing (e.g., P3, G4)

Each instance type offers different combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity.

3. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)

An AMI is a template that contains a software configuration (operating system, application server, and applications).

  • You can select from a library of AMIs or create your own

  • AMIs can be shared across AWS accounts

  • AMIs are regional but can be copied across regions

4. EC2 Purchasing Options

  • On-Demand Instances: Pay for compute capacity by the hour or second with no long-term commitments

  • Reserved Instances: Purchase instances in advance for significant discounts (1 or 3-year terms)

  • Spot Instances: Bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity for up to 90% off the On-Demand price

  • Dedicated Hosts: Physical EC2 servers dedicated for your use

Feature
On-Demand Instances
Reserved Instances
Spot Instances
Dedicated Hosts

Description

Pay for compute capacity by the second

Purchase instances in advance for significant discounts

Bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity

Physical EC2 servers dedicated for your use

Commitment

No long-term commitment

1 or 3-year terms

No long-term commitment

On-Demand or Reserved (1 or 3-year terms)

Price Discount

No discount

Up to 72% compared to On-Demand

Up to 90% compared to On-Demand

Can be combined with Reserved Instances for additional savings

Recommended Use Case

Short-term, spiky, or unpredictable workloads

Steady-state or predictable usage

Flexible start and end times, fault-tolerant or stateless workloads

Compliance requirements, licensing restrictions, or high-performance computing needs

Instance Control

Full control

Full control

Can be terminated by AWS with 2-minute warning

Full control

Capacity Reservation

No

Yes

No

Yes

Billing Granularity

Per second

Pre-pay options: All Upfront, Partial Upfront, No Upfront

Per second

Per hour

Availability

Always available

Limited to capacity in a specific AZ

Available only when there's spare EC2 capacity

Limited availability

Convertibility

N/A

Standard RIs are not convertible, Convertible RIs can change instance family, OS, tenancy, and payment option

N/A

N/A

Transferability

N/A

Can be transferred between AZs in the same region

N/A

N/A

5. EC2 Networking

  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC): Launch EC2 instances in a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud

  • Security Groups: Act as a virtual firewall for your instances to control inbound and outbound traffic

  • Elastic IP Addresses: Static IPv4 addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing

6. EC2 Storage Options

  • Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store): Persistent block storage volumes for use with EC2 instances

  • Instance Store: Temporary block-level storage for your instance

  • Amazon EFS (Elastic File System): Fully managed file storage service for use with EC2

7. EC2 Auto Scaling

Automatically adjust the number of EC2 instances in your deployment according to conditions you define.

  • Maintain application availability

  • Scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down automatically according to conditions you define

  • Automatically register new instances to a load balancer

8. Load Balancing

Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances.

Types of load balancers:

  • Application Load Balancer (ALB)

  • Network Load Balancer (NLB)

  • Classic Load Balancer (CLB)

9. EC2 Instance Metadata and User Data

  • Instance Metadata: Data about your instance that you can use to configure or manage the running instance. Instance metadata can be accessed usign IMDSv1 (Legacy method, less secure):

curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/

Common metadata endpoints:

bashCopy/latest/meta-data/ami-id                  # AMI ID
/latest/meta-data/instance-id             # Instance ID
/latest/meta-data/instance-type           # Instance type
/latest/meta-data/local-ipv4              # Private IP
/latest/meta-data/public-ipv4             # Public IP
/latest/meta-data/iam/security-credentials/# IAM role credentials
/latest/meta-data/placement/availability-zone # AZ information

  • User Data: Script that you can provide when launching your instance to perform common automated configuration tasks. To get user data (if configured):

bashCopycurl http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data

10. EC2 Hibernation

EC2 Hibernation preserves the in-memory RAM on persistent storage (EBS).

  • Faster boot-up because it doesn't need to reload the operating system

  • Instance RAM must be less than 150 GB

  • Available for specific instance families (C3, C4, C5, M3, M5, R3, R4, R5)

  • Supported on Windows, Amazon Linux 2 AMI, and Ubuntu

  • Instances cannot be hibernated for more than 60 days

  • Available for On-Demand and Reserved Instances

11. EC2 Placement Groups

Placement groups influence the placement of a group of interdependent instances to meet the needs of your workload.

Types:

  • Cluster Placement Group: Packs instances close together inside an Availability Zone (low network latency, high network throughput for HPC). All EC2 instances are placed within a rack.

  • Partition Placement Group: Spreads instances across logical partitions (Multiple EC2 instances; HDFS, HBase, and Cassandra). All EC2 instances are placed within a rack. Each partition represents a rack. If a rack fails (hardware failure), it may affect multiple instances on that rack, but only within that partition. Can spread multiple AZs.

  • Spread Placement Group: Strictly places instances on distinct hardware (when you need to separate critical EC2 instances to run on a separated hardware). Each instance is placed in its own distinct rack. Each rack has at most one instance. Can spread multiple AZs.

12. EC2 Enhanced Networking

Enhanced networking uses single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) to provide high-performance networking capabilities on supported instance types.

13. EC2 Monitoring

  • Basic Monitoring: Metric data available automatically in 5-minute periods at no charge

  • Detailed Monitoring: Metric data available in 1-minute periods for an additional cost

Here are the key EC2 metrics available by default through Amazon CloudWatch:

Basic Monitoring (5-minute intervals):

  1. CPU:

  • CPUUtilization (%)

  1. Disk:

  • DiskReadOps (Count)

  • DiskWriteOps (Count)

  • DiskReadBytes (Bytes)

  • DiskWriteBytes (Bytes)

  1. Network:

  • NetworkIn (Bytes)

  • NetworkOut (Bytes)

  • NetworkPacketsIn (Count)

  • NetworkPacketsOut (Count)

  1. Status Checks:

  • StatusCheckFailed (Count)

  • StatusCheckFailed_Instance (Count)

  • StatusCheckFailed_System (Count)

Detailed Monitoring (1-minute intervals, additional cost):

  • Same metrics as above but with higher frequency

  • Must be explicitly enabled

  • Additional charges apply

Important Notes:

  • Memory utilization is NOT included by default

  • Disk metrics only available for instance store volumes

  • For EBS volumes, you need to check EBS-specific metrics

  • CPU credit metrics available only for T-class instances:

    • CPUCreditUsage

    • CPUCreditBalance

    • CPUSurplusCreditBalance

    • CPUSurplusCreditsCharged

To get memory, disk space, and other system-level metrics, you need to:

  1. Install CloudWatch Agent

  2. Configure custom metrics collection

  3. Pay for custom metrics

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