EC2 Fundamentals

Question 1

What is EC2

Answer 1

Elastic Compute Cloud
Infrastructure as a service

Question 2

What are the 4 main purposes of EC2?

Answer 2

1. Renting virtual machines (EC2)
2. Storing data on virtual drives (EBS)
3. Distributing load across machines (ELB)
4. Scaling the services using an auto-scaling group (ASG)

Question 3

What does the cloud provide?

Answer 3

On demand computing

Question 4

Features:
- Operating System (OS): Linux(most popular), Windows or Mac OS.
- How much compute power and cores (CPU)
- How much random-access memory (RAM)
- How much storage space:
- Network-attached (EBS & EFS)
- hardware (EC2 Instance store)
- Network card: speed of the card, Public IP address
- Firewall rules: security group
- Bootstrap script (configure at first launch): EC2 User Data

Answer 4

EC2 sizing & configuration options

Question 5

How can an instance be bootstrapped?

Answer 5

With an EC2 User Data script

Question 6

What is bootstrapping?

Answer 6

launching commands when the machine starts

Question 7

When does the user data script run?

Answer 7

Once during the first start instance.

Question 8

Examples:
- Installing updates
- installing software
- Downloading common files from the Internet
- Anything you can think of…

Answer 8

EC2 user data script to automate boot tasks.

Question 9

EC2 User Data scripts runs with a root user?

Answer 9

True

Question 10

Any command you have will have the pseudo rights?

Answer 10

True

Question 11

Instance type:
- Balance between:
- Compute
- Memory
- Networking
- In the course, we will be using the t2.micro which is a General Purpose EC2 instance

Answer 11

General Purpose

Question 12

Instance type:
- Batch processing workloads
- Media transcoding
- High performance web servers
- High performance computing (HPC)
- Scientific modeling & machine learning
- Dedicated gaming servers

Answer 12

Compute Optimized - of C name

Question 13

Instance type:
- High performance, relational/non-relational databases
- Distributed web scale cache stores
- In-memory databases optimized for BI (Business Intelligence)
- Applications performing real-time processing of big unstructured data

Answer 13

Memory Optimized - of R/X/Z name

Question 14

Instance type:
- High frequency online transactions processing (OLTP) system
- Relational and NoSQL databases
- Cache for in-memory databases (ex: Redis)
- Data warehousing applications
- Distributed systems
- HPC Optimized
- Instance Features
- Measuring Instance Performance

Answer 14

Storage Optimized - of I/G/H1

Question 15

Uses hardware accelerators, or co-processors, to perform functions, such as floating point number calculations, graphics processing, or data pattern matching, more efficiently than is possible in software running on CPUs.

Answer 15

• Accelerated Computing

Question 16

Provides a balance of compute, memory and networking resources, and can be used for a variety of diverse workloads. These instances are ideal for applications that use these resources in equal proportions such as web servers and code repositories.

Answer 16

General Purpose

Question 17

Instance type:
- Generative AI applications, including question answering, code generation, video and image generation, speech recognition, and more.
- HPC applications at scale in pharmaceutical discovery, seismic analysis, weather forecasting, and financial modeling.

Answer 17

• Accelerated Computing

Question 18

Great for compute-intensive tasks that require high performance processors:

Answer 18

Compute Optimized - of C name

Question 19

Fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory

Answer 19

Memory Optimized - of R/X/Z name

Question 20

Great for storage-intensive tasks that require high, sequential read and write access to large data sets on local storage

Answer 20

Storage Optimized - of I/G/H1

Question 21

What are security groups

Answer 21

The fundamental of network security in AWS

Question 22

What do security groups contain?

Answer 22

They only contain allow rules

Question 23

What do security groups do?

Answer 23

Control how traffic is allowed into or out of our EC2 Instances

Question 24

How can a security group rules be referenced?

Answer 24

By IP or by security group

Question 25

What acts as a “firewall” on our EC2 instance?

Answer 25

Security groups

Question 26

What do security groups regulate?

Answer 26

• Access to ports
• Authorized IP ranges - IPv4 and IPv6
• Control of inbound network (from other to the instance)
• Control of outbound network (from the instance to other)

Question 27

How many instance can a security group be attached to?

Answer 27

Multiple instances

Question 28

What can security groups be locked down to?

Answer 28

A region/VPC combination

Question 29

What does it mean that a security group lives “outside” the EC2?

Answer 29

if the traffic is blocked the EC2 instance won’t see it

Question 30

If the application is not accessible because of timeout…

Answer 30

It is a security group issue

Question 31

If your application gives a “connection refused” error…

Answer 31

the it’s an application error or it’s not launched

Question 32

By default all inbound traffic is…

Answer 32

block

Question 33

By default all outbound traffic is…

Answer 33

authorized

Question 34

Ports to know:
22 = SSH (Secure Shell)

Answer 34

log into Linux instance

Question 35

Ports to know:
21 = FTP (file transfer protocol)

Answer 35

upload files into a file share

Question 36

Ports to know:
22 = SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol)

Answer 36

upload files using SSH

Question 37

Ports to know:
80 = HTTP

Answer 37

access unsecured websites

Question 38

Ports to know:
443 = HTTPS

Answer 38

access secured websites

Question 39

Ports to know:
3389 = RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol)

Answer 39

log into a Windows instance

Question 40

What is SSH?

Answer 40

Secure Shell is the primary method for securely accessing Linux servers from a command line interface.

Question 41

What is Putty?

Answer 41

Putty performs the same function as SSH but it’s for windows

Question 42

What is “EC2 Instance Connect”

Answer 42

Offers a method to connect to EC2 instances directly through a web browser, simplifying the process without the need for terminal or additional software.