Use Computer's Ability In The AWS Cloud With EC2
Did your parents ever use this on you? “If everyone else jumped off a bridge would you?”
As kids, we tend to test the boundaries. We were doing things that perhaps we shouldn’t have.
If your friend got a new game we wanted it too like in our work life. We want to be working on popular technology. One of the most popular is EC2 from AWS.
What is EC2?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t need to buy a computer? Someone just had as many as we wanted in the cloud? That is EC2 in a nutshell. Neal Davis of Digital Cloud Training says it this way.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable computing capacity in the cloud.
The word resizable is essential. EC2 has many instance types, more on this later, that give you the ability to choose the size. Depending on what you are doing select the right one for your work.
Why is it so popular?
Firstly, the cloud is popular as we don’t need to spend on the large upfront costs of a data center. Instead, scale your computing needs to your demand. A start-up can get the few servers they need. As they grow add over time.
Also, you have lots of options. Do you need a Windows server? Or MacOS? They have that along with many flavors of Linux too.
Select a preconfigured template known as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Next, start your instance and begin computing. Pretty easy huh!
Instance Types
Along with operating systems options you have Instance Types. For instance, General Purpose provides a balance of computing and memory power. Similarly, there is a compute and memory-optimized model available too.
Instance Options
There are a few instance options too. The standard one is On Demand. You pay for the hours you use with no commitment. It is low-cost and flexible with no upfront cost.
Spot Instances allow you to take advantage of unused EC2 capacity. It gives you a large discount from On Demand. It works well for stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications.
Reserved Instances are purchased ahead of time for a discount. They allow you to reserve capacity in a specified Availability Zone(AZ). Capacity is reserved for a term of 1 or 3 years.
Autoscaling
Have you ever had a pizza party? You invite a few people. Some show up, and some don’t. Then you have a lot of leftovers.
What if you always had the right amount? That is how EC2 Autoscaling works. Of course, not with pizza but with computing power.
You can set up rules to scale to your needs. Organizations no longer need to waste time and money. This feature alone is a really big seller for EC2!
How can we use it?
Using EC2 is quite easy. First, we need to launch an instance.
We can click the “Launch instances” button. Then we get to name our instance and choose the AMI.
Further down this long screen, we select the Instance Type.
We are using the default t2.micro here. This will keep us in the free tier.
Review the Network settings. You could edit these and modify the firewall settings here too.
Here is the Summary Launch screen. Click Launch instance and we are off and rolling.
After a few moments, you should see a “Running” EC2 instance like I have here. Make sure to delete your instance or it could charge you. Note that the Free Tier has limits on time.
Try this out and see how easy it is. Also, I provide screenshots here to help. That being said AWS changes things all the time. So when you read this and try it out it could look differently.
What are the limitations?
There are a few limitations and downsides to EC2. The first one is downtime. The resources can go down in the cloud. It has gotten better but AWS has had some issues.
Another is cost. Yes, it scales on demand. However, what happens to many companies is things get spun up and never shut down. Kind of like my kids keep leaving the lights on.
People will create EC2 instances and forget they don’t need them. Then the bill comes the next month and someone gets angry!
So now you know what is EC2, why it is popular, and some options. Autoscaling is a really big one. It can scale to your needs.
Also, we discussed how to use it and some of the limitations. There is no perfect solution. You need to understand your business needs. Find the right solution to solve your problem.