AWS/EC2

Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

SEE: Amazon EBS FAQs

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud. EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity (both up and down), as your computing requirements change.

Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.

• EBS Volume types (see: for details)
  • General purpose SSD (gp2): General purpose SSD volume that balances price and performance for a wide variety of transactional workloads

    up to 10,000 IOPS

  • Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1): Highest-performance SSD volume designed for mission-critical applications

    more than 10,000 IOPS or 160 MiB/s of throughput per volume

  • Throughput Optimized HDD (st1): Low cost HDD volume designed for frequently accessed, throughput-intensive workloads
  • Cold HDD (sc1): Lowest cost HDD volume designed for less frequently access workloads
  • Magnetic: infrequently accessed storage

NOTE: One can not mount 1 EBS volume to multiple EC2 instances; use EFS instead.

In order to enable encryption at rest using EC2 and Elastic Block Store, one needs to configure encryption when creating the EBS volume.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

SEE: Amazon EC2 FAQs

• EC2 provision types:
  • On-Demand: Allows you to pay a fixed rate by the hour with no commitment.
  • Reserved
    • Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances allow you to reserve Amazon EC2 computing capacity for 1 or 3 years, in exchange for a significant discount (up to 75%) compared to On-Demand instance pricing (must pay for entire reserved period up-front).
  • Spot
    • Amazon EC2 Spot instances allow you to bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity. Since Spot instances are often available at a discount compared to On-Demand pricing, you can significantly reduce the cost of running your applications, grow your application's compute capacity and throughput for the same budget, and enable new types of cloud computing applications.
    • Useful for applications that have flexible start and end times and are only feasible at very low compute prices.
    • Example use cases: genomics, pharmaceutical companies, etc.
    • If you terminate, you pay for the hour the instance was terminated
    • If Amazon terminates it, you do not pay for the hour the instance was terminated
    • EC2 Spot prices
  • Dedicated Hosts: Physical EC2 server dedicated for your use.
    • Dedicated Hosts can help you reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licences.
    • Useful for regulatory requirements that may not support multi-tenant virtualization (e.g., governments)
    • Can be purchased On-Demand (hourly)
    • Reserved Dedicated Hosts (from 1 to 3 years) have up to 70% discount.

• EC2 Instance Types:
  • D for Density (e.g., d2)
  • I for IOPS (e.g., i2)
  • R for RAM
  • T for general purpose (e.g., t2.micro)
  • M for Main choice (for general purpose apps)
  • C for Compute
  • G for Graphics
  • F for FPGA
  • P for general purpose GPU (this "pics")
  • X for Extreme memory
  • mnemonic: DIRTMCGFPX (or, "Dr Mc GIFT PX" => "Doctor McGift Pix" => gives out free pictures)

EC2 Instance Types
Family	Speciality	Use case
D2	Dense storage	fileservers, data warehousing, hadoop
R4	Memory optimized	memory intensive apps/DBs
M4	General purpose	application servers
C4	Compute optimized	CPU intensive apps/DBs
G2	Graphics intensive	video encoding, 3D application streaming
I2	High-speed storage	NoSQL DBs, data warehousing, etc.
F1	Field Programmable Gate Array	hardware acceleration for your code
T2	Lowest cost, general purpose	web servers, small DBs, etc.
P2	Graphics/general purpose GPU	machine learning, Bit Coin mining, etc.
X1	Memory optimized	SAP HANA/Apache Spark, etc.

• EC2 metadata:

$ curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-ipv4 # returns the EC2 instance's public IPv4

NOTE: If one makes an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) public, this AMI is not immediately available across all regions, by default.

With EC2 you can have 2 types of storage: EBS storage and Instance Store. EBS is persistent and if an EC2 instance is stopped with an EBS volume attached, there will be no data lost. Instance Store is ephemeral and if the EC2 instance is stopped, all data will be lost.