What Is Amazon EC2?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing
capacity in the Amazon Web Services (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.
Features of Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2 provides the following features:
Virtual computing environments, known as instances
Preconfigured templates for your instances, known as Amazon Machine
Images (AMIs), that package the bits you need for your server (including the
operating system and additional software)
Various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity for
your instances, known as instance types
Secure login information for your instances using key pairs (AWS stores the
public key, and you store the private key in a secure place)
Storage volumes for temporary data that's deleted when you stop or terminate
your instance, known as instance store volumes
Persistent storage volumes for your data using Amazon Elastic Block Store
(Amazon EBS), known as Amazon EBS volumes
Multiple physical locations for your resources, such as instances and Amazon
EBS volumes, known as Regions and Availability Zones
A firewall that enables you to specify the protocols, ports, and source IP
ranges that can reach your instances using security groups
Static IPv4 addresses for dynamic cloud computing, known as Elastic IP
addresses
Metadata, known as tags, that you can create and assign to your Amazon
EC2 resources
Virtual networks you can create that are logically isolated from the rest of the
AWS cloud, and that you can optionally connect to your own network, known
as virtual private clouds (VPCs)
How to Get Started with Amazon EC2
If you've already signed up for Amazon Web Services (AWS), you can start using
Amazon EC2 immediately. You can open the Amazon EC2 console, choose Launch
Instance, and follow the steps in the launch wizard to launch your first instance.
If you haven't signed up for AWS yet, or if you need assistance launching your first
instance, complete the following tasks to get set up to use Amazon EC2:
1. Sign Up for AWS
When you sign up for Amazon Web Services (AWS), your AWS
account is automatically signed up for all services in AWS, including
Amazon EC2. You are charged only for the services that you use.
With Amazon EC2, you pay only for what you use. If you are a new
AWS customer, you can get started with Amazon EC2 for free.
If you have an AWS account already, skip to the next task. If you don't have
an AWS account,create a aws account
2. Create an IAM User
Use your AWS account email address and password to sign
In the navigation pane, choose Users and then choose Add user.
For User name, enter Administrator.
Select the check box next to AWS Management Console access. Then
select Custom password, and then enter your new password in the text box.
(Optional) By default, AWS requires the new user to create a new password
when first signing in. You can clear the check box next to User must create a
new password at next sign-in to allow the new user to reset their password
after they sign in.
Choose Next: Permissions.
Under Set permissions, choose Add user to group.
Choose Create group.
In the Create group dialog box, for Group name enter Administrators.
Choose Filter policies, and then select AWS managed -job function to filter
the table contents.
In the policy list, select the check box for AdministratorAccess. Then
choose Create group.
Back in the list of groups, select the check box for your new group.
Choose Refresh if necessary to see the group in the list.
Choose Next: Tags.
(Optional) Add metadata to the user by attaching tags as key-value pairs.
Choose Next: Review to see the list of group memberships to be added to
the new user. When you are ready to proceed, choose Create user.
3. Create a Key Pair
Sign in to AWS using the URL that you created in the previous section.
From the AWS dashboard, choose EC2 to open the Amazon EC2 console.
From the navigation bar, select a region for the key pair.
In the navigation pane, under NETWORK & SECURITY, choose Key Pairs.
Tip
The navigation pane is on the left side of the console. If you do not see the
pane, it might be minimized; choose the arrow to expand the pane. You may
have to scroll down to see the Key Pairs link
Choose Create Key Pair.
Enter a name for the new key pair in the Key pair name field of the Create
Key Pair dialog box, and then chooseCreate.
The private key file is automatically downloaded by your browser.
4. Create a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Open the Amazon VPC.
From the navigation bar, select a region for the VPC. VPCs are specific to a
region, so you should select the same region in which you created your key
pair.
On the VPC dashboard, choose Launch VPC Wizard.
On the Step 1: Select a VPC Configuration page, ensure that VPC with a
Single Public Subnet is selected, and choose Select.
On the Step 2: VPC with a Single Public Subnet page, enter a friendly
name for your VPC in the VPC name field. Leave the other default
configuration settings, and choose Create VPC. On the confirmation page,
choose OK.
5. Create a Security Group
Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.
From the navigation bar, select a region for the security group. Security
groups are specific to a region, so you should select the same region in which
you created your key pair.
Choose Security Groups in the navigation pane.
Choose Create Security Group.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Elastic IP addresses allow you to allocate a static IP address and programmatically assign it to an
instance. You can enable monitoring on an Amazon EC2 instance using Amazon CloudWatch2 in
order to gain visibility into resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patterns
(including metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic).
Amazon Relational Database Service9 (Amazon RDS) provides an easy way to setup, operate and
scale a relational database in the cloud. You can launch a DB Instance and get access to a full-
featured MySQL database and not worry about common database administration tasks like backups,
patch management etc.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS)10 is a reliable, highly scalable, hosted distributed
queue for storing messages as they travel between computers and application components.
Amazon Simple Notifications Service (Amazon SNS) provides a simple way to notify applications
or people from the cloud by creating Topics and using a publish-subscribe protocol.
Amazon Elastic MapReduce provides a hosted Hadoop framework running on the web-scale
infrastructure of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service
(Amazon S3) and allows you to create customized JobFlows. JobFlow is a sequence of MapReduce
steps.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) allows you to extend your corporate network into a
private cloud contained within AWS. Amazon VPC uses IPSec tunnel mode that enables you to create
a secure connection between a gateway in your data center and a gateway in AWS.
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) enable you to create multiple Users with unique
security credentials and manage the permissions for each of these Users within your AWS Account.
IAM is natively integrated into AWS Services. No service APIs have changed to support IAM, and
exiting applications and tools built on top of the AWS service APIs will continue to work when using
IAM.
AWS also offers various payment and billing services that leverages Amazon’s payment
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