The Power of AWS EC2 : Part 1
Tags: ec2, aws, cloud, cloudskills
Published: 2022-07-04 04:14:35

Welcome reader, it is time for you to leverage power on the cloud, using Amazon Web Service EC2.

You might wonder, What is EC2?

> You might say, "Oh not again, one of those technical terms, designed to cause confusion."

**EC2** stands for **Elastic Cloud Compute**.
It is a foundational piece of AWS' cloud computing platform and is a service that provides servers for rent in the cloud.

Alright, lets cut the chase. Is the term **EC2** a technical lingua? 
Yes, it is.
Is it coined to cause confusion? Not it is not.

The sole purpose of this post is to, discover or reinforce the knowledge we seek

### The Power of AWS EC2: Part 1

- Why is it important
- Amazon EC2 features

AWS remains atop competitors in the high-growth cloud infrastructure space, holding 33% of the market share during the Q1 2022. [Source](https://www.ciodive.com/news/aws-microsoft-google-cloud-market-share/623004/)

AWS provides Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) a powerful computing service on the cloud. 
Using Amazon EC2 eliminates your need to invest in hardware up front, it supports your growth to develop and deploy applications faster.

Users can launch virtual servers, configure security and networking, manage cookies from an intuitive dashboard on the [AWS Console](https://aws.amazon.com/console/). 


![Aws Ec2](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/yij2h8lfoe8tue97gylj.jpeg)

### Why is it important

- You don’t require any hardware units
- Pay as you go (You only pay for what you use)
- You have complete control
- You can access your assets from anywhere in the world
- Easily scalable (up or down)


### Amazon EC2 features

#### Global Infrastructure

- Multiple Locations: Amazon EC2 locations are composed of Regions and Availability Zones. Availability Zones are distinct locations, that provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region.

### Storage
Different AWS EC2 workloads would require a different type of storage, asides for the inbuilt storage AWS offers

> Amazon's Elastic Block Storage (EBS) service enables block-level storage volumes to be attached to EC2 instances and be used as hard drives. 

> Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) automatically grows and shrinks as you add and remove files with no need for management or provisioning.


### Elastic IP addresses
An Elastic IP address is ideal for failover clusters scenerios, for load balancing, or for other purposes where there are multiple servers running the same service. 
It is associated with your account and not always necessarily with your instance.

### Operating Systems and Software
Amazon Ec2 supports far many different operating systems,  Microsoft Windows and Linux distributions such as Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, SUSE and Debian.

You must specify an AMI when you launch an instance. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), are images supported and maintained by AWS that provides the information required to launch an instance. 

### Cost and Capacity Optimization

- Your pay for what you use
- Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, I would be talking more on Auto Scaling on another post.
- Paused and resumed from the same state.
- Amazon EC2 Fleet
: enables the deployment and management of instances as a single virtual server. It makes it possible Launch, stop and terminate EC2 instances. 

We have come to the end of **The Power of AWS EC2: Part 1**
Next post, we would cover EC2 Instance Types & A lab Walkthrough, on how to set up an EC2 instance.

![sleepy](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/4kd6ene13l6qyiavdzh8.gif) It's past 5am WAT, feeling sleepy! Good Night