Introduction to AWS IaaS Solutions

Chapter 3. Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud

In this chapter, we examine the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) using practical examples of deploying an EC2 instance, taking snapshots, creating images, and operational tasks through both the web console and the AWS command-line interface (CLI). These are important tasks that will be familiar to what you might have done in a virtualization environment.

EC2 Fundamentals

Working with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) implementations on AWS means using EC2 for your compute platform. This is where you build virtual machines (VMs) that can run nearly any operating system (OS). EC2 runs on shared underlying infrastructure by default but with strict security boundaries protecting resources from reaching one another between customers.

You do have the option to run dedicated instances that are allocated onto physical hosts, which are only provisioned with your EC2 workloads. Another option is to choose dedicated hosts. This lets you have more control at the physical layer and also lets you run licensed applications that have limitations around binding to specific CPUs. You might find this on-premises today if you run Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle SQL Server, or other similarly licensed software.

You choose EC2 instance configuration and size based on family type (e.g., T3, C5, R5, H1) and then by what you might call “t-shirt size” (e.g., small, medium, large, xlarge, and 2xlarge). The ...