AWS Compute Flashcards
What is Amazon EC2?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service with which you can run virtual server “instances” in the cloud.
What OS can EC2 instances run?
Amazon EC2 instances can run the Windows, Linux, or MacOS operating systems.
How does EC2 help with ease of use?
The EC2 simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction.
EC2 is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.
What is the benefit of EC2 in terms of economics of computing?
Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you use.
What does Amazon EC2 provide developers with tools to do?
Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate them from common failure scenarios.
What are the benefits of Amazon EC2?
- Elastic Web-Scale computing – you can increase or decrease capacity within minutes not hours and commission one to thousands of instances simultaneously.
- Completely controlled – You have complete control include root access to each instance and can stop and start instances without losing data and using web service APIs.
- Flexible Cloud Hosting Services – you can choose from multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages as well as instances with varying memory, CPU, and storage configurations.
- Integrated – EC2 is integrated with most AWS services such as S3, RDS, and VPC to provide a complete, secure solution.
- Reliable – EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned with SLAs of 99.99% for each region.
- Secure – EC2 works in conjunction with VPC to provide a secure location with an IP address range you specify and offers Security Groups, Network ACLs, and IPSec VPN features.
- Inexpensive – Amazon passes on the financial benefits of scale by charging very low rates and on a capacity consumed basis.
What is an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)?
An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a special type of virtual appliance that is used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (“EC2”).
What does an AMI include?
An AMI includes the following:
- One or more EBS snapshots, or, for instance-store-backed AMIs, a template for the root volume of the instance (for example, an operating system, an application server, and applications).
- Launch permissions that control which AWS accounts can use the AMI to launch instances.
- A block device mapping that specifies the volumes to attach to the instance when it’s launched.
How many categories does AMI come in?
Community AMIs – free to use, generally you just select the operating system you want.
AWS Marketplace AMIs – pay to use, generally come packaged with additional, licensed software.
My AMIs – AMIs that you create yourself.
What is Metadata and User Data in EC2?
Metadata and User Data:
- User data is data that is supplied by the user at instance launch in the form of a script.
Instance metadata is data about your instance that you can use to configure or manage the running instance. - User data is limited to 16KB.
- User data and metadata are not encrypted.
- Instance metadata is available at http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data.
What does the Instance Metadata Query Tool allow you to do?
The Instance Metadata Query tool allows you to query the instance metadata without having to type out the full URI or category names.
What pricing options does EC2 have?
- On demand
- Reserved
- Spot
- Dedicated Hosts
- Dedicated Instances
- Savings Plans
What is On Demand Pricing in EC2?
Good for users that want the low cost and flexibility of EC2 without any up-front payment or long-term commitment.
Applications with short term, spiky, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted.
Applications being developed or tested on EC2 for the first time.
What is Reserved Pricing in EC2?
- Applications with steady state or predictable usage.
- Applications that require reserved capacity.
- Users can make up-front payments to reduce their total computing costs even further.
- Standard Reserved Instances (RIs) provide up to 75% off on-demand price.
- Convertible RIs provide up to 54% off on-demand price – provides the capability to change the attributes of the RI if the exchange results in the creation of RIs of equal or greater value.
- Scheduled RIs are available to launch within the time window you reserve. This option allows you to match your capacity reservation to a predictable recurring schedule that only requires a fraction of a day, a week, or a month.
What is Spot Pricing in EC2?
- Applications that have flexible start and end times.
- Applications that are only feasible at very low compute prices.
- Users with an urgent need for a large amount of additional compute capacity.
- If Amazon terminate your instances you do not pay, if you terminate you pay for the hour.
What is Dedicated Hosts Pricing in EC2?
- Physical servers dedicated just for your use.
- You then have control over which instances are deployed on that host.
- Available as On-Demand or with Dedicated Host Reservation.
- Useful if you have server-bound software licenses that use metrics like per-core, per-socket, or per-VM.
- Each dedicated host can only run one EC2 instance size and type.
- Good for regulatory compliance or licensing requirements.
- Predictable performance.
- Complete isolation.
- Most expensive option.
- Billing is per host.
What is Dedicated Instances Pricing in EC2?
- Virtualized instances on hardware just for you.
- Also uses physically dedicated EC2 servers.
- Does not provide the additional visibility and controls of dedicated hosts (e.g. how instances are placed on a server).
- Billing is per instance.
- May share hardware with other non-dedicated instances in the same account.
- Available as On-Demand, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances.
- Cost additional $2 per hour per region.
What is Savings Plans Pricing in EC2?
- Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model that provides savings of up to 72% on your AWS compute usage.
- This pricing model offers lower prices on Amazon EC2 instances usage, regardless of instance family, size, OS, tenancy, or AWS Region.
- Also applies to AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda usage.
What are Instance Types in EC2?
Amazon EC2 provides a wide selection of instance types optimized to fit different use cases.
Instance types comprise varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity and give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your applications.
Each instance type includes one or more instance sizes, allowing you to scale your resources to the requirements of your target workload.
What is Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)?
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is another product in the AWS Compute category. It provides a highly scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances.
What does ECS eliminate the need for?
Amazon ECS eliminates the need for you to install, operate, and scale your own cluster management infrastructure.
What can you do with API calls in ECS?
Using API calls you can launch and stop container-enabled applications, query the complete state of clusters, and access many familiar features like security groups, Elastic Load Balancing, EBS volumes and IAM roles.
Scheduling in ECS
Amazon ECS can be used to schedule the placement of containers across clusters based on resource needs and availability requirements.
What are Launch Types in ECS?
An Amazon ECS launch type determines the type of infrastructure on which your tasks and services are hosted.
