AWS Computing Flashcards
What is Amazon EC2?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service in the AWS Compute suite of products that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.
What are the benefits of 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 including 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 99.95% 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 AMI?
An Amazon Machine Image is a special type of virtual appliance that is used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
What are some characteristics of On-demand pricing for 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.
- Low cost and flexible
What are some characteristics of Reserved pricing for EC2?
- Best for long term savings
- Designed for apps that have a steady state or predictable usage
- 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 as long as 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 are some characteristics of Spot pricing for EC2?
- Applications that have flexible start and end times and can handle interruptions.
- 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 are some characteristics of Dedicated host pricing for EC2?
- Good for regulatory compliance or licensing requirements
- Predictable performance
- Complete isolation
- Most expensive option
- Billing is per host
- Physical servers dedicated just for your use
- You then have control over which instances are deployed on that host
What are some characteristics of Dedicated instance pricing for EC2?
- 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 are the different EC2 instance types?
- General Purpose
- Compute Optimized
- Memory Optimized
- Accelerated Computing
- Storage Optimized
What is 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.
There is no additional charge for Amazon ECS.
What is ECR?
The Elastic container registry (ECR) is a managed AWS Docker registry service for storing, managing and deploying Docker images. With Amazon ECR, there are no upfront fees or commitments. You pay only for the amount of data you store in your repositories and data transferred to the Internet.
What is AWS Lambda?
- AWS Lambda is a serverless computing technology that allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers.
- AWS Lambda executes code only when needed and scales automatically.
- You pay only for the compute time you consume (you pay nothing when your code is not running).
What are primary use cases for AWS Lamba?
- Data processing
- Real-time file processing
- Real-time stream processing
- Build serverless backends for web, mobile, IOT, and 3rd party API requests
What is Amazon Lightsail?
Amazon Lightsail provides developers compute, storage, and networking capacity and capabilities to deploy and manage websites, web applications, and databases in the cloud.
Amazon Lightsail includes everything you need to launch your project quickly – a virtual machine, SSD-based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static IP.
