EC2 - Fundamentals/Instance Types

Question 1

What is Amazon EC2?

Answer 1

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is AWS’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), allowing you to rent virtual machines (EC2 instances) to run applications in the cloud.

Question 2

What can you configure when launching an EC2 instance?

Answer 2

You can choose the operating system (Linux, Windows, or MacOS), compute power (CPU), RAM, storage type (EBS or instance store), network settings, security groups (firewall rules), and bootstrap (EC2 User Data) scripts.

Question 3

What is the purpose of EC2 User Data?

Answer 3

EC2 User Data allows you to automate tasks at the time of instance launch, like installing software, updates, or downloading files. It runs only once and with root (admin) privileges.

Question 4

What are EC2 Instance Types?

Answer 4

EC2 instance types are different configurations of virtual machines that you can choose based on your workload needs. They vary by compute power, memory, storage, and network performance.

Question 5

What does the EC2 instance name (e.g., M5.2xlarge) mean?

Answer 5

The naming convention is:

M: Instance class (e.g., general purpose)
5: Generation (e.g., M5, the 5th generation of M-type instances)
2xlarge: Size (e.g., 2xlarge means larger resources like more CPU and RAM).

Question 6

What are the main EC2 instance types and their use cases?

Answer 6

General Purpose (e.g., T2, M5): Balanced CPU, memory, and networking for a wide range of workloads.

Compute Optimized (e.g., C5, C6): Best for compute-heavy tasks like media transcoding and high-performance web servers.

Memory Optimized (e.g., R5, X1): Ideal for memory-heavy tasks like in-memory databases and real-time data processing.

Storage Optimized (e.g., I3, G4): Great for high storage workloads like databases and data warehousing.