Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform that offers a wide range of services to customers, including computing, storage, and databases, among others. One of the most popular services provided by AWS is the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows customers to rent virtual servers and run applications on them.

EC2 instances are virtual servers in the cloud that can be created, launched, and managed easily. In this article, we'll discuss the basics of EC2 instances and how they work.

What is an EC2 Instance?

An EC2 instance is a virtual server in the AWS cloud that provides compute capacity. It is a scalable computing resource that can be easily launched, configured, and managed. Each instance is created from an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which is a pre-configured virtual machine image that contains an operating system, applications, libraries, and other necessary components.

EC2 instances can be created in various sizes and configurations, depending on the customer's requirements. They can run a variety of operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and macOS.

How EC2 Instances Work

EC2 instances are launched from an AMI and can be configured with various settings, including the instance type, storage, and security settings. Once launched, the instance runs on a virtual machine in the cloud, and customers can access it using various methods, including the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or the AWS SDKs.

EC2 instances can be launched in various sizes, ranging from small, low-cost instances to large, high-performance instances with specialized capabilities. Customers can choose an instance type based on the specific needs of their application. For example, they can choose an instance type with high compute power for running CPU-intensive workloads, or an instance type with high memory for running memory-intensive applications.

EC2 instances can also be configured with various storage options, including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), which provides persistent block-level storage, or Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), which provides scalable, network file storage.

Security is also an important consideration when launching EC2 instances. Customers can configure security settings, including virtual private cloud (VPC) settings, security groups, and access control policies, to ensure that their instances are secure.

Links

  • [amazon.aws.ec2_security_group module](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/amazon/aws/ec2_security_group_module.html#ansible-collections-amazon-aws-ec2-security-group-module)
  • [amazon.aws.ec2_instance](https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/amazon/aws/ec2_instance_module.html)

Demo

This is a YAML code block that outlines an Ansible playbook for creating an EC2 instance on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The playbook consists of three tasks, each of which performs a specific action:

1. The fi