AWS Compute Services

What are Computation Services?

Computation services are services that offer computation power or computation capacity to run your system. This is like providing your server capacity to run your applications.

What is AWS EC2?

AWS EC2 is a compute service that provides IaaS services on the AWS Cloud Platform. IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Service. That means complete infrastructure is provided by AWS which one can configure to suit our needs.

With EC2 we can launch instances of different types. Instances which are nothing but minicomputers that have their separate small storage, network and compute capacity.

These mini computers can be called as Instances. In more sophisticated term, these are nothing but virtual machines that reside on server, but give a feel of running on our system.

Amazon EC2 offers instances that can be a Windows Operating System, can be an Unbuntu or Linux Operating system and much more. In these instances, it is possible to take backup of data, create replicas or templates of instances being used.

AWS EC2 has a large family of EC2 instances and they vary based on quite a few factors.

Types of AWS EC2 Instances 

AWS offers many kinds of instances, The types of AWS EC2 Compute Instances are:

• General Purpose Instances- These instances provide balance in computation, memory, and network capabilities. They can handle a variety of workloads and serve a diverse set of purposes. If our applications need resources in equal proportions be it your servers, repositories etc. Then one can opt for AWS EC2 general purpose instances
• Compute Optimized- If we have applications that need processors with high performance, then one should opt for AWS EC2 Compute optimized instances. In short, they are best suited for Compute bound applications.
• Memory Optimized- These are designed for fast optimized performance. The aim is the ability to process workloads with large data set processing in memory. 
• Storage Optimized-These types of instances are designed to manage workloads where one need constant and high speed read write access. Also the data sets being dealt are voluminous and reside on local storage. 
• Accelerated Computing- These instances can be thought of as Graphical processing intensive type of instances. This happens in a better efficiency than the normal software that runs on systems.

EC2 Pricing Model

• On Demand- As the name suggests, these instances can be requested on demand. These instances do not require any upfront costs. When we request an instance, it is made available to us and it serves a particular purpose for us. These instances scale up depending upon the need of the application and will be charged accordingly.
• Spot Instances- If we have workloads that can be managed by instances, which do not require specific configurations, then AWS EC2 Spot instances will serve as well. Examples include Big data, CD, Web servers etc.
• Reserved Instances- When we are certain about the capacity and time in which we want to use EC2 resource it is wise to opt for AWS EC2 reserved instances, these ensure. Since we are aware about the requirement, it is booked or reserving those instances for a particular duration. 
• Dedicated Instances- These instances are best suited for applications that need to or can be used with Server Bound Applications. Here we have a host that uses Dedicated EC2 Server and since we are using Server bound resources it is also available cheaply.

Launching a Virtual Machine with AWS EC2

Once we sign up for a fee tier AWS console, we will see the following page,

Step1:

Click on Services and we will see all the services AWS provides. Under Compute Domain, click on AWS EC2,

Step2:

Click on running instances,

Step3:

Click on launch instances,

Step4:

It will take us to AWS EC2 AMI page, where we have an option to choose different instances, we will select a free tier eligible Windows Server instance by scrolling down the list.

AWS EC2 AMI or Amazon Machine Image is nothing but a template of instance or virtual machine which preconfigured to suit certain configuration requirements

Step5:

With AWS we have the option to configure the settings to suit our needs, however we will stick to the default requirements here, so continue clicking next until we reach the below page. Here we will create a key value pair that helps login to the instance. This key pair if lost then we cannot login to an AWS Instance, so ensure we download it and keep it safe. Then click on ‘Launch Instance’

Step6:

Click on view instance and will be directed to following page, wait till the status checks for the instance are complete and green. Click on Connect at the top lane.

Step7:

Download RDP, this is what we will use to log in to AWS EC2 instance, click on get password, Once we click on get password, we get a prompt to select the key we want to decrypt. Select the PEM key-pair file, we downloaded during launching the instance. Now decrypt it and open the RDP file that was downloaded in previous step, also keep the password decrypted copied.

Step8:

Click on connect, following window will appear, enter the decrypted key in the password, say OK and say yes,

Step10:

There you go, AWS EC2 instance is up and running. This instance will look like and function as Windows virtual machine.

One can configure this instance suit our needs further. Also you can launch other types of EC2 instances like Ubuntu, linux, etc. Do give it a try.

This brings us to the end of this article, Hope you liked AWS EC2 article.

Happy Learning!