EC2 Overview

EC2 is short for Elastic Compute Cloud. It offers a virtual machine in the cloud, but with a few tricks up its sleeve.

As with every virtual machine you can connect a virtual network interface to it, as well as some storage too for storing purpose. What most virtual machines cannot do however, is auto-scaling, growing and shrinking your servers on-demand completely automatically. EC2 has the unique ability that this is all built-in to the AWS services.

Again, some things might look familiar when you first have a look at the EC2 dashboard in AWS, but others might not. Here is a rundown of some terms that you will come across.

In a very simple word, if I need to explain what EC2 means ,it is like creating a machine over internet with all the same things which you would require to configure an on premises machine(System) with new terms that’s all.

Now go to Services from there choose EC2 service and then click on EC2 Dashboard. Please find EC2 Dashboard screenshot as below for your references.

Types of EC2 instance

Regular or On Demand

An AWS EC2 Instances is nothing but a server hosted on the cloud. Just like our physical server on premises, it comes with varying specs for compute, memory, networking, and storage.

SPOT Instances

Spot instances requests allow you to bid on spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity. Since Spot instances are often available at a discount price as compared to On-Demand instance pricing, you can significantly reduce the cost of running your applications, grow your application’s compute capacity and throughput for the same budget.

Reserved Instances

Reserved instances is a pricing model based on your commitment. We can pay for our EC2 instances up-front and in return you will get a reduced hourly rate. Using Reserved Instances We can save up to 75% on your monthly EC2 expenditure.

AMI

AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) are much similar to snapshots in VMware. We can launch new EC2 instances from an AMI and we can even share our AMI with multiple AWS accounts too.