WEBVTT

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In this lecture, we will learn
about EC2 instances in AWS.

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Perhaps one of the most commonly used
services from AWS

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or any cloud provider for that matter
are virtual machines in the cloud.

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These virtual machines provide
scalable compute

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that can be deployed in a matter of minutes.

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In AWS, they are called as EC2 instances,

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where EC2 stands for elastic compute cloud

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and just like any compute, virtual or physical,

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an EC2 instance would run an operating system
such as a distribution of Linux or windows.

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We can then make use of these instances
for deploying software such as database,

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web servers, application servers

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or pretty much anything that you would
normally want to deploy in a physical

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or virtual machine, which is on premise.

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AWS EC2 provides pre-configured templates
known as Amazon machine image or AMIs.

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These templates contain software
configuration such as the operating system

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and any additional software to be deployed
on these EC2 instances.

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Examples are Ubuntu 20.04, RHEL 8,
Amazon Linux 2, windows 2019, et cetera.

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These AMIs have an ID which is specific to
the region where we want to deploy the instance.

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EC2 also provides a number of
different configurations of CPU,

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memory and networking capacity
for the instances

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which are known as instance types.

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There are a wide selection of instance types
to choose from

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that are optimized to fit different use cases.

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One example of the instance type is
the general purpose instance type,

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and this can be used for several types
of common workloads.

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Then there are compute
optimized instance types

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to work on workloads that require
high-performance CPUs

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such as batch processing workloads
and data modeling.

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The memory optimized instance types

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are designed to deliver fast performance

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for workloads that process
large data sets in memory.

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These are just few of the examples.

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For the complete list, please check out
the reference documentation.

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The most commonly used instance type
that suits most of the common workloads

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is the general purpose instance.

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These are further divided
into different categories

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such as T2, T3, and M5 instances for example.

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Each of these categories can be sized
to the specification that a user may need.

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For example, the T2 Nano provides
one virtual CPU and half a gig of RAM.

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The T2 micro provides one vCPU
and one gig of RAM.

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If you want to go for a higher spec,
you can choose from a number of different sizes

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such as the small, medium, large,
all the way up to 2X large.

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The sizes shown here are specific to
the T2 general purpose instance type,

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and they may not necessarily be
the same for all other instances.

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For a comprehensive list, please refer
to the reference documentation.

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Persistent storage for these instances is
provided by another service called the EBS,

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which stands for elastic block storage.

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As of this recording,
there are five types of EBS volumes.

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Three of these are high-performance
solid state type disks,

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and the other two are low cost hard disk drives.

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The size and type of storage
to be attached to an EC2 instance

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is available for the user to select
before provisioning.

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Additional disks may also be attached
post provisioning.

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The EC2 also allows us to pass in user data
to the instances being created.

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This allows us to perform
common configuration tasks

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or even run scripts when the instances start.

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For example, if you want to install
the NGINX package

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on an Ubuntu server when it's launched,

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we can pass in a shell script
as the user data like this.

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For windows instances,
we can also pass in a PowerShell

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or a batch script with the same effect.

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Once deployed, the Linux EC2 instances
are usually accessed using SSH keys.

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For the windows instances,
we can make use of the remote desktop

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or RDP along with the username and password.

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In the subsequent demo, we will see
how to deploy a Linux EC2 instance

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using the AWS management console.