Learning about Amazon EC2

As you learn in the previous section, Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) is an AWS way of naming servers. It's nothing new, but virtual machines hosted on a physical server reside inside the AWS data center in a secure environment. It is all about standardizing infrastructure's management, security, and growth and building the economy of scale to quickly meet the client demand for their services in minutes and not months. AWS takes full advantage of virtualization technologies and can slice one computer to act like many computers.

Many of their main competitors offer the ability to spin up resources quickly. However, some data center vendors still require users to go through a long cycle, so it can be weeks or months before you can start using the provisioned resources, and it could take just as long to decommission these resources. When you are using AWS, you can shut off access to resources with the same speed and agility as when you requested and...

Advantage of EC2

In the previous section, you learned about various EC2 instances provided by AWS. Selecting the correct EC2 instance for a given workload means finding the instance family that closely matches your workload's CPU and memory needs. Amazon EC2 provides a wide selection of instances, which give you lots of flexibility to compute right-size resources to match workload needs while keeping your cost low. Let's look at them and understand the key advantages of using EC2.

The diverse set of instances to choose

EC2 offers nearly 400 instances to enable customers to run virtually every workload. You can choose from instances that offer less than a single processor (T3 instances) and up to 96 processors (C5 instances). Memory is available from the hundreds of megabytes (T3 instances) to 24 terabytes (High Memory Instance), the most memory of any major IaaS provider. Network performance ranges from a single Gigabit (T2 instances)to 100 Gigabit (Elastic Fabric Adapter)....

EC2 pricing model

While the standard cloud price model is the pay-as-you-go model, AWS provides multiple options to optimize your cost further. As servers are a significant part of any IT infrastructure, it is better to understand all available cost options and get the best out of your dollar. The followings are the four different ways to purchase compute in AWS:

• On-Demand: Pay for compute capacity by the second with no long-term commitments. It is best suited for fluctuating workloads, for example, stock trading. It is the default choice when you spin up an instance and is also suitable for a quick experiment.
• Reserved Instance (RI): You can commit 1- or 3 years to a specific EC2 instance family and receive a significant discount of up to 72% off On-Demand prices. It is best for a steady workload where you know not much fluctuating, for example, internal HR portal. Reserve instance like a coupon where you pay in advance, and it applies automatically when your spin-up instance belongs...

AWS Compute Optimizer

AWS provides compute Optimizer recommends optimal instances for Amazon EC2 and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups from 140+ instances from M, C, R, T, and X families. It uses machine learning models trained on millions of workloads to help customers optimize their compute resources for cost and performance across all workloads they run. You can take advantage of the recommendations in Compute Optimizer to reduce costs by up to 25%. The followings are the benefits of using compute Optimizer:

• Get instance type and auto-scaling groups recommendations, making it easier for you to choose the right to compute resources for specific workloads.
• Get a deep analysis of a workload's configuration, resource utilization, and performance data to identify dozens of defining characteristics, such as whether the workload is CPU-intensive and exhibits a daily pattern. Compute Optimizer then uses machine learning to process these characteristics to predict how the workload would...

Amazon Machine Images (AMI)

Even though there are so many EC2 instance types to choose from, the number of instance types pales compared to the number of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) available. An AMI contains the information needed to start an instance. An AMI needs to be specified when launching an instance.

The chosen AMI will determine the characteristics of the EC2 instance, such as the following:

• Operating system: The currently supported operating systems are as follows:

1. Ubuntu
2. Amazon Linux
3. CentOS
4. Debian
5. Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6. FreeBSD
7. SUSE
8. Fedora
9. Gentoo
10. macOS
11. Mint
12. OpenSolaris
13. Windows Server

• Architecture: The architecture that will be used:

1. 64-bit (Arm)
2. 32-bit (x86)
3. 64-bit (x86)
4. 64-bit (Mac)

• Launch permissions: The launch permissions will determine when and where the AMI can be used:

1. Public: All AWS accounts can launch this AMI.
2. Explicit: Only specific AWS accounts can launch the AMI.
3. Implicit: Implicit launch permission is given to launch the AMI.

• Root device storage...

Reviewing Amazon EC2 best practices

How you use and configure EC2 is going depends on your use case. But some general EC2 best practices will ensure the security, reliability, durability, and availability of your applications and data. Let's delve into the recommended practices for handling security, storage, backup management, etc.

Access

Like with almost any AWS service, it's possible to manage the access and security of your EC2 instances, taking advantage of identity federation, policies, and IAM. You can create credential management policies and procedures to create, rotate, distribute, and revoke AWS access credentials.

You should assign the least privilege possible to all your users and roles like any other service. As they say in the military, your users should be on a need-to-know basis.

One advantage or disadvantage of using EC2 directly is that you are entirely in charge of managing the operating system changes. For that reason, ensure that you regularly maintain...

Serverless compute

Building serverless applications is one of the primary advantages of moving to the cloud. They reduce admin overhead to manager infrastructure, thus increasing productivity and further reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) in the cloud. The serverless app can be highly performant due to the ease of parallelization and concurrency. Serverless computing is the foundation of serverless apps as it manages to scale automatically, is optimized to reduce latency and cost, and increases throughput. Let’s learn about available serverless compute options in AWS.

AWS Lambda

When it comes to serverless computing, AWS Lambda comes first in mind. With Lambda, you can unleash the creativity and speed of development organizations without compromising the IT team’s ability to provide a scalable, cost-effective, and manageable infrastructure.

AWS Lambda is an event-driven, serverless compute service that extends other AWS services with custom logic or creates other...

High-Performance Computing

High-Performance Computing (HPC) generally refers to aggregating computing power in a way that delivers much higher performance than one could get out of a typical desktop computer or workstation to solve significant problems in science, engineering, or business. HPC workloads are characterized by a combination of multiple technologies such as storage, compute, networking, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), scheduling and orchestration, streaming visualization, etc., combined with specialized third-party applications.

HPC workloads are classified into categories that help identify the AWS services and solutions that can best match your needs. These categories include Fluid Dynamics, Weather Modelling, and Reservoir Simulation; these workloads are typically called scale-up or tightly coupled workloads. The other HPC workloads are Financial Risk Modeling, Genomics, Seismic Processing, and Drug Discovery, typically called scale-out or loosely...

Hybrid compute

While you want to benefit from the advantages of using the cloud, all your applications cannot be migrated to an AWS due to latency or the need for local data processing. Latency Sensitive applications such as patient care flow require less than 10 ms responses, and any delays can affect critical processes you want to compute to be local near your equipment. Similarly, there are instances when you can’t afford downtime due to intermittent networking and want local Data Processing. For example, image, voice, and video applications generate large data files that can be more efficiently processed at the edge.

If you can't move to the region because of data residency, local processing, or latency requirements have to build and maintain the on-premises infrastructure at your facility. In that case, you must maintain IT Infrastructure, which involves complex procurement and provisioning process from multiple vendors with months-long lead time. In addition, you will...