January 2026
Intermediate to advanced
254 pages
6h 48m
English
Content preview from AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) Study Guide
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Chapter 9. AWS Compute, Containers, and Serverless
Compute is the engine behind running applications, crunching data, and delivering services. On AWS, compute takes several forms. You’ve got virtual servers through Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), container-based setups with Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and lightweight, event-driven code with AWS Lambda. Each option strikes a different balance between control, scalability, and how much management you want to handle yourself.
When preparing for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, understanding compute is critical. So this chapter walks you through the essentials—how to launch and secure EC2 instances, what containers bring to the table, and how serverless can take infrastructure off your plate entirely. You’ll also get familiar with features like Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), which help applications stay responsive and cost-effective, even under changing loads.
EC2
In Chapter 2, we saw how Amazon EC2 is one of the core building blocks in AWS’s IaaS offerings. At its simplest, EC2 lets you spin up VMs in the cloud. You can launch them, shut them down, configure them to your needs, and manage them remotely. It’s one of the most widely used services in AWS, and not surprisingly, it shows up frequently on the exam.
A big draw of EC2 is how quickly you can get started. Launching an instance usually takes just a few minutes once configured. But there are some important ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.