What are the different terminologies used in AWS EC2?

EC2 stands for elastic compute cloud, which provides easy to scale computing capability to the instances of the Amazon services. EC2 provides all the hardware resources needed to run the service, thereby eliminating a portion of the cost which has to be investing in purchasing the hardware. The focus would be on developing and deploying the applications which are created, in a much efficient manner quickly.

EC2 can be used to launch multiple servers depending on the data. It also helps manage security aspects as well as network part of the service. It helps efficiently store data and allows scaling up or down the resources as and when the requirement arises.

Terminologies used in AWS EC2

1. AMI: Also known as Amazon Machine Pictures. It is a template that houses the software configuration like an operating system, an application, or a server.
2. Instances: An object that is created within a service which can be used to serve other requests.
3. Region and availability zones: EC2 is hosted in multiple locations all over the world. These locations consist of a variety of regions and availability zones.
4. Amazon EC2 key-pairs: EC2 uses public keys which help in encrypting and decrypting the login information.
5. Security groups: They help associate an EC2 instance with a group, thereby providing security to the instance at the protocol level as well as port access level.
6. VPC: Virtual Private Cloud, that allows to provide an isolated section in the Amazon Cloud, so that an AWS resource can be launched in a virtual network which is defined by the user.

Features of AWS EC2

• Once an instance is terminated or stopped, it is deleted thereby saving the storage space. This is known as ‘instance store volumes’.
• It provides isolated virtual computing environments, which can be used to launch separate instances of a service.
• Comes with pre-configured AMIs, which are templates that is required by the server.
• EBS provides persistent storage volumes for the data which is stored by the user, with the help of Elastic Block Store.
• Data of instances, resources, EBS volumes can be stored in multiple locations so as to deliver high-availability. These locations are known as ‘regions’ and ‘availability zones’.
• The elastic IP address is a static IPV4 address that is provided for dynamic cloud computing.
• It comes with instance varieties, which offers a wide range of options to choose from, in case of hardware, memory, and networking ability.
• It has a Virtual Private Network that allows networks to virtually connect to the user’s network.

Amazon EC2 storage

The Amazon EC2 storage consists of two kinds of storage:

Amazon EBS

EBS helps in the storage of data with the help of block level storage. Block level storage is just like a hard drive, but the only change is that it is present in the cloud. It is used in conjunction with Amazon EC2 instances.

These block level storages can be mounted as devices on EC2 instances. These storages can be stacked on top of each other (like EBS volumes) and a file system can be created on top. This setup can be used to manage and run a database, server or utilize it for different requirements like a block device/hard drive.

Instance store

This consists of one or more blocks that belong to the same type. Based on the type of the instance, the size of these instance stores and the number of devices that are available can be changed.

Conclusion 

In this post, we understood the significance of EC2 as well as terminologies associated with it.