AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Edited November 9, 2020 by Sahithi Ancha and Keumah Jung and Andra Ferrara
scalable computing capacity in the AWS Cloud
AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
What Is AWS EC2?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud provides scalable computing capacity in the AWS Cloud. Using Amazon EC2 eliminates your need to invest in hardware up front, so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing your need to forecast traffic.
Who Should Use AWS EC2?
Nowadays, many leading organizations are deploying applications on their Elastic Compute Cloud instance. Since there are many types of instances depending on your application, this will help reduce the cost for many small scale businesses.
How Do I Learn About it?
- Amazon has some very good documentation about AWS EC2 https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/getting-started/
- Datacamp has a very good tutorial about EC2 https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/aws-ec2-beginner-tutorial
- ACloudGuru also has some very good courses
https://acloudguru.com/aws-cloud-training
Strengths
- EC2 is easy to script
- AWS provides very good documentation on how to use EC2
- It is widely used and has a huge community
Limitations
- It limits resources by region
- Billing can be confusing sometimes
- Common cloud computing problems
Alternative Options
- Google Compute Engine
- DigitalOcean Droplets
- Azure Virtual Machines
- IBM Cloud Virtual Servers
- Rackspace Technology
- Linodes Standard
References
- Amazon’s official documentation - https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/getting-started/