Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

AWS Cloud Technology and Services Concepts

Alex Kuntz

Head of Cloud Curriculum, DataCamp

What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)?

  • Provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud
  • Each individual EC2 machine is referred to as an instance

Key characteristics:

  • Ability to scale up or down based on demand
  • Availability of a varied range of instance types for specialized use cases

A branched chart showing compute connection to storage, databases, and networks.

AWS Cloud Technology and Services Concepts

EC2 instance types

AWS offers six categories of EC2 instances for specialized workloads

  • General purpose
  • Compute optimized
  • Memory optimized
  • Storage optimized
  • Accelerated computing
  • High Performance Computing (HPC) optimized

Icons showing grouped EC2 instances and a singular EC2 instance.

AWS Cloud Technology and Services Concepts

General purpose and storage optimized instances

General purpose instances

  • Balance of compute, memory, and networking resources
  • Use cases:
    • Hosting dynamic websites
    • Maintaining code repositories

EC2 instance icon showing a general purpose instance.

Storage optimized instances

  • High, sequential read and write access to large datasets
  • Use cases:
    • Data warehousing
    • Refactoring large relational databases

EC2 instance icon showing a storage optimized instance.

AWS Cloud Technology and Services Concepts

Compute and memory optimized instances

Compute optimized instances

  • Compute-intensive and high-performance workloads
  • Use cases:
    • Scientific simulations
    • Financial modeling

EC2 instance icon showing a compute optimized instance.

Memory optimized instances

  • Memory-intensive workloads not requiring high storage
  • Use cases:
    • Real-time stream data analytics
    • Generating close captions

EC2 instance icon showing a memory optimized instance.

AWS Cloud Technology and Services Concepts

Specialized compute instances

Accelerated computing instances

  • Contain specialized hardware accelerators, like GPUs or FPGAs
  • Use cases:
    • Deep learning
    • Rendering gaming graphics

EC2 instance icon showing an accelerated computing instance.

HPC optimized instances

  • Best price performance for running high performance workloads at scale
  • Use cases:
    • Weather forecasting
    • Crash simulations

EC2 instance icon showing a high performance compute optimized instance.

AWS Cloud Technology and Services Concepts

Creating your EC2 instance

Architecture Diagram for an EC2 instance

AWS Cloud Technology and Services Concepts

Connecting to your EC2 instance: SSH Client

  • SSH connects with a private key
  • Those keys must be managed

SSH client

AWS Cloud Technology and Services Concepts

Connecting to your EC2 instance: AWS Session Manager

  • Keyless access via the Management Console
  • Integrates with Identity and Access Management (IAM)

AWS Session Manager

AWS Cloud Technology and Services Concepts

Connecting to your EC2 instance: EC2 Instance Connect

  • Browser-based connection
  • Quick and temporary access

EC2 Instance Connect

AWS Cloud Technology and Services Concepts

Let's practice!

AWS Cloud Technology and Services Concepts

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