EC2 - computing service

The first element that a cloud system has to provide to the users is computing power. EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud, and it allows you to create machines on the cloud with a few clicks.

This is what the EC2 interface looks like:

EC2 was launched on August 25, 2006 (beta version), and it has evolved a lot since then. It provides the user with different sizes of machines and is available across the globe (11 different regions as of today). This means that the user can spin up machines in different parts of the globe for high availability and latency purposes, enabling the engineers of your company to build multi-zone applications without coordinating teams across the globe.

They also provide different types of instances optimized for different tasks so that the users can tailor the infrastructure to their needs. In total, there are 24 different type of instances, but they are also grouped by type, which we will walk through later on in this chapter.

Let’s look at an example of how to launch an instance.