What is EC2 instance?

This recipe explains what is EC2 instance

What is EC2 instance?

A virtual server in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for running applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure is known as an Amazon EC2 instance. AWS is a comprehensive and ever-evolving cloud computing platform; EC2 is a service that allows business subscribers to run application programs in a computing environment. It can serve as a virtually limitless number of virtual machines (VMs).

To meet the needs of users, Amazon offers a variety of instances with varying configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources. Each type is available in a variety of sizes to meet the needs of different workloads.

Amazon Machine Images are used to create instances (AMI). The machine images function as templates. They are pre-installed with an operating system (OS) and other software that determines the user's operating environment. Users can choose an AMI from AWS, the user community, or the AWS Marketplace. Users can also create and share their own AMIs.

Amazon EC2 instance features

Many EC2 instance features, such as storage, the number of virtual processors and memory available to the instance, the OS, and the AMI on which the instance is based, are customizable . The Amazon EC2 instance features listed below:

    • Operating system -

EC2 supports a wide range of operating systems, including Linux, Microsoft Windows Server, CentOS, and Debian.

    • Persistent storage.

Amazon's Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service lets you attach block-level storage volumes to EC2 instances and use them as hard drives. EBS allows you to increase or decrease the amount of storage available to an EC2 instance, as well as attach EBS volumes to multiple instances at the same time.

    • Elastic IP addresses -

IP addresses can be associated with instances using Amazon's Elastic IP service. Elastic IP addresses can be moved from instance to instance without the assistance of a network administrator. This makes them ideal for use in failover clusters, load balancing, and other applications where multiple servers are running the same service.

    • Amazon CloudWatch -

This web service allows for the monitoring of AWS cloud services and AWS-hosted applications. CloudWatch is capable of collecting, storing, and analyzing historical and real-time performance data. It can also monitor applications proactively, improve resource utilization, reduce costs, and scale up or down based on changing workloads.

    • Automated scaling

In response to application demand, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling automatically adds or removes capacity from Amazon EC2 virtual servers. Auto Scaling adds capacity to handle temporary spikes in traffic during a product launch or to increase or decrease capacity based on whether usage is above or below certain thresholds.

    • Bare-metal instances -

These virtual server instances are made up of hardware resources like a processor, storage, and a network. They are not virtualized and do not run an operating system, so they have a smaller memory footprint, more security, and more processing power.

    • Amazon EC2 Fleet -

This service allows you to deploy and manage instances as a single virtual server. The Fleet service allows you to launch, stop, and terminate EC2 instances across all EC2 instance types in a single action. Amazon EC2 Fleet also offers API-based programmatic access to fleet operations. Existing management tools can be used to integrate fleet management. Policies can be scaled in EC2 Fleet to automatically adjust the size of a fleet to match the workload.

    • Pause and resume instances -

EC2 instances can be paused and resumed at a later time. For example, if an application consumes too many resources, it can be paused without incurring usage charges

Steps to create EC2 instance

    • • Step 1:

Enter "EC2 instance" in the search bar after signing into your AWS (Amazon Web Service) account. The EC2 instance management console's dashboard will then open. To create a new EC2 instance, click on new to instance.

    • • Step 2

You can add tags to an instance in the Name and Tags phase. For instance, you could create a list of tags to keep track of each instance's owner, setting, or function. Any resource, including accounts, security, and tags, can be described.

    • • Step 3

As required, you can also launch additional AMIs, such as an Amazon Linux,Windows,Ubuntu,Red Hat AMI. Other than the t2.micro instance type, which you can choose, all other instance types are charged and are not eligible for the AWS free tier.

    • • Step 4

You need to first create a key pair in order to connect to the Windows Server. Click "Create a new key pair" and give the key-pair a name, such as "Windows-key," to accomplish this.

    • • Step 5

Continue by clicking Launch Instance without making any changes to the default settings.

    • • Step 6

We've started our instance. Now Then select View all Instances.

    • • Step 7

You will see there that your instance is starting to run and that the Status check is initializing.

What Users are saying..

profile image

Ray han

Tech Leader | Stanford / Yale University
linkedin profile url

I think that they are fantastic. I attended Yale and Stanford and have worked at Honeywell,Oracle, and Arthur Andersen(Accenture) in the US. I have taken Big Data and Hadoop,NoSQL, Spark, Hadoop... Read More

Relevant Projects

Graph Database Modelling using AWS Neptune and Gremlin
In this data analytics project, you will use AWS Neptune graph database and Gremlin query language to analyse various performance metrics of flights.

Getting Started with Pyspark on AWS EMR and Athena
In this AWS Big Data Project, you will learn to perform Spark Transformations using a real-time currency ticker API and load the processed data to Athena using Glue Crawler.

Learn Data Processing with Spark SQL using Scala on AWS
In this AWS Spark SQL project, you will analyze the Movies and Ratings Dataset using RDD and Spark SQL to get hands-on experience on the fundamentals of Scala programming language.

Hive Mini Project to Build a Data Warehouse for e-Commerce
In this hive project, you will design a data warehouse for e-commerce application to perform Hive analytics on Sales and Customer Demographics data using big data tools such as Sqoop, Spark, and HDFS.

SQL Project for Data Analysis using Oracle Database-Part 6
In this SQL project, you will learn the basics of data wrangling with SQL to perform operations on missing data, unwanted features and duplicated records.

SQL Project for Data Analysis using Oracle Database-Part 2
In this SQL Project for Data Analysis, you will learn to efficiently analyse data using JOINS and various other operations accessible through SQL in Oracle Database.

Build a Data Pipeline with Azure Synapse and Spark Pool
In this Azure Project, you will learn to build a Data Pipeline in Azure using Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Storage, Azure Synapse Spark Pool to perform data transformations on an Airline dataset and visualize the results in Power BI.

Build Classification and Clustering Models with PySpark and MLlib
In this PySpark Project, you will learn to implement pyspark classification and clustering model examples using Spark MLlib.

PySpark Project-Build a Data Pipeline using Hive and Cassandra
In this PySpark ETL Project, you will learn to build a data pipeline and perform ETL operations by integrating PySpark with Hive and Cassandra

AWS Project for Batch Processing with PySpark on AWS EMR
In this AWS Project, you will learn how to perform batch processing on Wikipedia data with PySpark on AWS EMR.