Section 2 - Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Flashcards
What is a EC2?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
- Cloud virtual servers
- Use preconfigured template called Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to luch instances
- Deploy applications directly to EC2 instances
- You receive 750 Compute hours per month on Free Tier plan
- EC2 offers Loading balancing and Auto Scalling
Category: Compute
List 5 EC2 pricing plans?
- On-Demand - Fixed price billed down to the second
- Spot instances - Unused EC2 capacity, only if capacity is vailable (Cheapest option)(Work loads can be interrrupted) (can save up 90% off On-Demand prices)
- Reserved Instances (1 year or 3 years contracts)(can save up 75% off On-Demand prices)(Pay all upront, Partially upfront, No upfront ) (provides convertible types at 54% discount)
- Dedicated Hosts - Fully dedicated physical server to you (You can bring your own license)(can save up 70%off On-Demand prices)
- Savings plans - commit to compute usage (measured per hour) (1 to 3 years contract) (Does not provide capacity reservation)(can save up 72% off On-Demand prices)
EC2 pricing plan - On Demand Model?
- With On-Demand instances, you pay for compute capacity by the hour or the second depending on which instances you run.
- No longer-term commitments or upfront payments are needed.
- You can increase or decrease your compute capacity depending on the demands of your application and only pay the specified per hourly rates for the instance you use.
On-Demand instances are recommended for:
- Users that prefer the low cost and flexibility of Amazon 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 Amazon EC2 for the first time
EC2 pricing plan - Spot instances Model?
- Amazon EC2 Spot instances allow you to request spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity for up to 90% off the On-Demand price.
- You can use Spot Instances for various stateless, fault-tolerant, or flexible applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), and test & development workloads.
- You also have the option to hibernate, stop or terminate your Spot Instances when EC2 reclaims the capacity back with two-minutes of notice.
Spot instances are recommended for:
- Applications that have flexible start and end times
- Applications that are only feasible at very low compute prices
- Users with urgent computing needs for large amounts of additional capacity
EC2 pricing plan - Dedicated Hosts Model?
- Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts allow you to use your eligible software licenses from vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle on Amazon EC2, so that you get the flexibility and cost effectiveness of using your own licenses, but with the resiliency, simplicity and elasticity of AWS.
- An Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is a physical server fully dedicated for your use, so you can help address corporate compliance requirements.
- Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is also integrated with AWS License Manager, a service which helps you manage your software licenses, including Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server licenses.
- Can be purchased On-Demand (hourly).
- Can be purchased as a Reservation for up to 70% off the On-Demand price.
- Can be used for regulatory requirements that may not support multi-tenant virtualization
EC2 pricing plan - Savings Plans Model?
- Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model offering lower prices compared to On-Demand pricing, in exchange for a specific usage commitment (measured in $/hour) for a one or three-year period.
- AWS offers three types of Savings Plans – Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans, and Amazon SageMaker Savings Plans.
- Compute Savings Plans apply to usage across Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and AWS Fargate.
- The EC2 Instance Savings Plans apply to EC2 usage, and Amazon SageMaker Savings Plans apply to Amazon SageMaker usage.
- You can easily sign up a 1- or 3-year term Savings Plans in AWS Cost Explorer and manage your plans by taking advantage of recommendations, performance reporting, and budget alerts.
- Savings Plans offers significant cost savings in exchange for a commitment to consistent amount of usage for a 1- or 3-year term.
- For example, the EC2 Instance Savings Plans offer up to 72% savings compared to On-Demand pricing on your Amazon EC2 Instances usage.
- The Amazon SageMaker Savings Plans offer up to 64% savings on your Amazon SageMaker services usage.
EC2 pricing plan - Reserved Instance Model?
- Reserved Instances provide you with a significant discount (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand Instance pricing.
- Reserved Instances are assigned to a specific Availability Zone, they provide a capacity reservation, giving you additional confidence in your ability to launch instances when you need them.
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Standard Reserved Instances
- provide you with a significant discount (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand Instance pricing, and can be purchased for a 1-year or 3-year term.
- Customers have the flexibility to change the Availability Zone, the instance size, and networking type of their Standard Reserved Instances.
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Purchase Convertible Reserved Instances
- If you need additional flexibility, such as the ability to use different instance families, operating systems, or tenancies over the Reserved Instance term.
- Convertible Reserved Instances provide you with a significant discount (up to 54%) compared to On-Demand Instances and can be purchased for a 1-year or 3-year term.
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Scheduled Reserved Instances
- Purchasing Reserved Instances on a recurring schedule lets you pay for compute capacity by the hour and obtain a capacity reservation ahead of time for only the time periods you will need it.
- Example, Think of a heavy capacity requiring exercise a company would have to perform a couple of days every month.
- You can choose between three payment options when you purchase a Standard or Convertible Reserved Instance.
- With the All Upfront option, you pay for the entire Reserved Instance term with one upfront payment. This option provides you with the largest discount compared to On-Demand Instance pricing.
- With the Partial Upfront option, you make a low upfront payment and are then charged a discounted hourly rate for the instance for the duration of the Reserved Instance term.
- The No Upfront option does not require any upfront payment and provides a discounted hourly rate for the duration of the term.
EC2 Instance Types - General Purpose?
General purpose instances provide 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.
EC2 Instance Types - Compute Optimized?
Compute Optimized instances are ideal for compute bound applications that benefit from high performance processors. Instances belonging to this family are well suited for batch processing workloads, media transcoding, high performance web servers, high performance computing (HPC), scientific modeling, dedicated gaming servers and ad server engines, machine learning inference and other compute intensive applications.
EC2 Instance Types - Memory Optimized?
Memory optimized instances are designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory. in memory caching applications.
EC2 Instance Types - Accelerated Computing?
Accelerated computing instances use 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.
EC2 Instance Types - Storage Optimized?
Storage optimized instances are designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to very large data sets on local storage. They are optimized to deliver tens of thousands of low-latency, random I/O operations per second (IOPS) to applications. e.g. No SQL
IOPS Versus Throughput?
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IOPS (Input/output operations per second (IOPS, pronounced eye-ops))
- Measures the number of read and write operation per second
- Important metric for quick transactions, low latency apps, transactional workloads
- The ability to action reads and writes very quickly
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Throughput
- Measures the number of bits read or written per second (MB/s)
- Important metric for large datasets, large I/O sizes, complex queries.
- The ability to deal with large datasets
What is Amazon EBS?
Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) is storage device (called a volume) that can be attached to (or removed from) your instance.
- Data persists when the instance is not running
- Can only be attached to one instance in the same Availability Zone
- Designed for mission critical workloads (Production)
- Automatically replicated within a single Availability Zone to protect against failures (Highly Available)
- Dynamically increase capacity and hcange type volume with no downtime or performace impact to you live systems (Scalable)
Recommended For:
- Quickly accessible data
- Running a database on an instance
- Long-term data storage
EBS Volume Types - Solidate State Disk (SSD)?
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General Purpose SSD (gp2)
- A balance of price and perfomance
- Good for boot volumes or development and test applications which are not latency sensitive.
- gp2 volumes smaller than 1 TB can burst up to 3,000 IOPS.
- 3 IOPS per GiB, up to a maximum of 16,000 IOPS per volume.
- 99.9% durability
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Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1)
- Up to 64,000 IOPS per volume. 50 IOPS per GiB
- use if you need more than 16,000 IOPS
- High performance option and the most expensive.
- Designed for I/O intensive applications, large databases, and latency-sensitive workloads.
- 99.9% durability
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Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) Latest
- io2 is the same price as io1
- latest generation
- Higher durability and more IOPS
- 500 IOPS per GiB
- Up to 64,000 IOPS
- 99.999% durability
- Designed for I/O intensive applications, large databases, and latency-sensitive workloads.
- Applications which need high levels of durablity.
EBS Volume Types - Hard Disk Drive (MB/s-Intensive) ?
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Throughput Optimized HDD (st1)
- Low cost HDD volume.
- Baseline throughput of 40 MB/s per TB
- Ability to burst up to 250 MB/s per TB
- Maximum throughput of 500 MB/s per volume.
- Cannot be a boot volume (ec2)
- Usage scenario:
- Frequently-accessed, throughput-intensive workloads
- Big Data, Data warehouses, ETL, and log processing
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Cold HDD (SC1)
- Lowest cost option
- Baseline throughout of 12 MB/s per TB
- Ability to burst up to 80MB/s per TB
- Max throughput of 250MB/s per volume
- Cannot be a boot volume (ec2)
- Usage Scenario:
- A good choice for colder data requiring fewer scans per day.
- Perfomance is not a factor
What is Classic Load Balancer (Legacy)?
Classic Load Balancer (Lagacy) distributes application traffic across multiple EC2 instances in multiple Availaibility Zones.
- Inproves fault tolerance on your applications
- Elastic Load balancing detects unhealty instances and routes traffic only to healthy instances.
- HTTP/HTTPS - Supports Layer 7 specific features, such as X-Forwarded-For headers and sticky sessions.
- TCP - Support Layer 4 load balancing for applications that rely purely on TCP protocol.
What is an Application Load Balancer?
Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes your incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in one or more Availability Zones.
- It monitors the health of its registered targets, and routes traffic only to the healthy targets.
- Elastic Load Balancing scales your load balancer as your incoming traffic changes over time. It can automatically scale to the vast majority of workloads.
- Operates at OSI Model Layer 7 (Application Layer)
What is a AWS Gateway Load Balancer?
AWS Gateway Load balancer makes it easy and cost-effective to deploy, scale and manage the availability of third-party virtual appliances such as firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems and deep packet inspection systems in the cloud. AWS Partner Network and AWS Marketplace partners can also offer their virtual appliances as-a-service to AWS customers without having to solve the complex problems of scale, availability and service delivery.
