07-01 EC2 Overview

Last updated Aug 17, 2023 Edit Source

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows you to launch Virtual Machines (VM)

#aws-service ^259d24

A Virtual Machine (VM) is an emulation of a physical computer using software.
Server Virtualization allows you to easily create, copy, resize or migrate your server.
Multiple VMs can run on the same physical server so you can share the cost with other customers.
Imagine if your server or computer was an executable file on your computer

When we launch a virtual machine we call it an “instance”

#aws-resource
EC2 is highly configurable where you can choose an amazon machine image (AMI) that affects options such as:

• the amount of CPUs
• the amount of memory
• the amount of network bandwith
• the operation system (OS) eg. Windows 10, Ubuntu, Amazon Linux 2
• Attach multiple virtual hard-drives for storage eg. Elastic Block Store (EBS)

EC2 is also considered the backbone of AWS because the majority of AWS services use EC2 as the underlying server
eg. S2, RDS, DynamoDB, Lambdas