A Quick Intro To AWS and Overview of EC2:
Some Brief idea about of AWS:
Amazon web services is the most popular amongst all other cloud service vendors. It started way before others did and hence it is pretty powerful and in demand! Next in the market comes Microsoft Azure followed by comes Google cloud and others.
(For better understanding of cloud computing, I would suggest you to take a glance through my previous article and then get into this story so that it becomes easier to understand the concepts)
AWS as per Wikipedia:
Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis.
Advantages of AWS:
Cost Effective — AWS doesn’t disappoint their customers when it comes to cost, they provide the best packages and promise reasonable prices.
Secure — No one likes to compromise when it comes to security and AWS makes sure that their clients don’t face any security threats.
Scalability — You can easily downgrade and upgrade your resources/services based on your needs and pay accordingly. It’s always recommended to start from the small scale and then upgrade the services as per requirements.
The Global architecture of AWS:
This allows the customer to access the data centres across the world easily. For example, you can be in India and you can access the services from the US. Isn’t it cool how easy it is to work, when you have everything on the cloud. All you need to do is get a good enough internet connection that is easily available via ’n’ number of sources these days.
AWS has 76 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions around the world, and has announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain.
Domains of AWS:
This would be an extremely brief content on each domains and we shall cover it more properly in the upcoming stories:
Compute
Here you only need to focus on the instance, that is a virtual server (designed on your requirements like OS, etc) that hosts your application and/or processes. It just works like a normal server that you have at your workplace. Let me give an example, you host an intranet app on the service in your office and you can directly access it only when you’re in your office network. But, when you host it on the EC2(Elastic Compute Cloud), it is widely accessible irrespective of what OS you’re running or where you are. We’ll try to cover EC2 in this story!
Migration
Migration lets you physically migrate the data. Snowball is a feature that lets you move the data easily.
Security and compliance
All the required identification and authentication tools are available to keep your data super safe with public and private keys.
Storage
There are quite a few services here, the most common one would be S3 where you store your files and Glacier where you store your archives.
Networking
It’s a network that can be used within AWS. There are networking tools and resources that enable you to securely connect to the cloud and then isolate, control, and distribute your applications across EC2 compute resources and all other relevant services in AWS.
Messaging
Yes, AWS even provides a utility for secure messaging. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a highly available, durable, secure, fully managed pub/sub messaging service that enables you to decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. Amazon SNS provides topics for high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging.
Databases
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) A managed service that makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.It is like SQL but way faster than that!
Management Tools
AWS Management Tools helps the user to manage the components of the cloud and their account. It programmatically allows the user to provision, monitor, and automate all the components.Tools like Cloud Watch are monitoring tools, etc.
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Overview of EC2:
So lets understand what is an EC2 -
EC2 — Amazon Elastic Compute cloud, is a web service that provides resizable compute services in the cloud. This uses virtualization in the best way, and can run Operating-System of your choice. Every process hosted acts like its in a stand alone application.
Usually when you get started with AWS, EC2 is the one from which you start exploring.
After creating the account you go and search for EC2 service and set it up according to your needs. To do that you’ll surely have to dig up more on setting up of EC2. It’s basically just setting up your instance based on your requirements, and you’ll all that you need with respect to OS, Root storage and all the other components required to set up a suitable instance for your application.
Types of EC2 Instances -
General purpose Instances are for applications that don’t need too much processing and are lightweight.
Compute Optimized Instances are for processes that need heavy processing from the CPU.
Memory Optimized Instances for applications that are much heavier and need more RAM.
Storage Optimized Instances are for the applications that need more space in terms of size of it on the server.
Accelerated Computing for hardware accelerators, or co-processors, to perform functions, such as floating point number calculations, graphics processing, or data pattern matching, more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs.
EC2 Instance Pricing Models -
On Demand — With On-Demand instances, you pay for compute capacity by the hour or the second depending on which instances you run.
Dedicated — A Dedicated Host is a physical EC2 server dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses, including Windows Server, SQL Server, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (subject to your license terms), and can also help you meet compliance requirements.
On spot — Amazon EC2 Spot instances allow you to request spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity for up to 90% off the On-Demand price.
Reserved — Reserved Instances provide you with a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand instance pricing.
Per second billing — With per-second billing, you pay for only what you use. It takes the cost of unused minutes and seconds in an hour off of the bill, so you can focus on improving your applications instead of maximising usage to the hour. Especially, if you manage instances running for irregular periods of time, such as dev/testing, data processing, analytics, batch processing and gaming applications, can benefit.
Savings Plans — Savings Plans are a flexible pricing model that offer low prices on EC2 and Fargate usage, in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1 or 3 year term.
AMI -
AMI is a feature that allows you to take a snapshot of an instance of EC2. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) provides the information required to launch an instance. You must specify an AMI when you launch an instance. You can launch multiple instances from a single AMI when you need multiple instances with the same configuration. You can use different AMIs to launch instances when you need instances with different configurations.
It helps you to avoid the headache of repetitively setting up each and every instance for a particular type of application on different instances. Instead just take a snapshot of most suitable instances and restore it to the desired instance.
For example, there are preloaded AMIs Like:
The AWS Deep Learning AMIs provide machine learning practitioners and researchers with the infrastructure and tools to accelerate deep learning in the cloud, at any scale. You can quickly launch Amazon EC2 instances pre-installed with popular deep learning frameworks and interfaces such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Apache MXNet, Chainer, Gluon, Horovod, and Keras to train sophisticated, custom AI models, experiment with new algorithms, or to learn new skills and techniques. Cool, isn’t it?
Well, that’s all for this story! :)