AWS EC2 is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud. EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change.
EC2 has changed the economics of cloud computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that your actually use. EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resistant applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.
Allows you to pay a fixed rate by the hour (or by the second) with no commitment.
Use Cases
- Perfect for users that want the low cost and flexibility of EC2 without any of the 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 EC2 for the first time
Provides you with a capacity reservation, and offer a significant discount on the hourly charge for an instance. 1 year or 3 year terms.
Use Cases
- Applications with steady state or predictable usage
- Applications that require reserved capacity
- Users can make up front payments to reduce their total computing costs even further
- Standard RIs (Up to 75% off on-demand)
- Convertible RIs (Up to 54% off on-demand) feature the capability to change the attributes of the RI as long as the exchange results in the creation of Reserved Instances of equal or greater value. Ability to go from CPU intensive instance to Memory intensive.
- Scheduled RIs are available to launch within the time window you reserve. This option allows you to match your capacity reservation to predictable recurring schedule that only requires a fraction of a day, a week, or a month.
Enables you to bid whatever price you want for an instance capacity, providing for even greater savings if your applications have flexible start and end times.
Use Cases
- Applications that have flexible start and end times
- Applications that are only feasible at very low compute prices
- Used for single compute instances to save on costs compared to 9-5 during the week.
- Users with an urgent need for a large amount of additional computing capacity.
Physical EC2 server dedicated for your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses.
Use Cases
- Useful for regulatory requirements that may not support multi-tenant virtualization.
- Great for licensing which does not support multi-tenancy or cloud deployments
- Can be purchased On-Demand (hourly).
- Can be purchased as a Reservation for up to 70% off the On-Demand price.
No need to memorize for associate exams
| Family | Specialty | Use Cases |
|---|---|---|
| F1 | Field Programmable Gate Array | Genomics research, financial analytics, real-time video processing, big data etc |
| I3 | High Speed Storage | NoSQL DBs, Datawarehousing |
| G3 | Graphics Intensive | Video Encoding / 3D Application Streaming |
| H1 | High Disk Throughput | MapReduce-based workloads, distributed file systems such as HDFS and MapR-FS |
| T2 | Lowest Cost General Purpose | Web Servers / Small DBs |
| D2 | Dense Storage | Fileservers / Data Warehousing / Hadoop |
| R4 | Memory Optimization | Memory Intensive Apps/DBs |
| M5 | General Purpose | Application Servers |
| C5 | Compute Optimized | CPU Intensive Apps / DBs |
| P3 | Graphics / General Purpose GPU | Machine Learning, Bit Coin Mining etc |
| X1 | Memory Optimized | SAP HANA / Apache Spark |
How to remember EC2 instance types F.I.G.H.T.D.R.M.C.P.X (after 2017 reinvent):
- F - FGPA
- I - IOPS
- G - Graphics
- H - High Disk Throughput
- T - Cheap General Purpose (think T2 Micro)
- D - Density
- R - Ram
- M - Main choice for general purpose applications
- C - Compute
- P - Graphics(Pics)
- X - Extreme Memory
Amazon EBS allows you to create storage volumes and attach them Amazon EC2 instances. Once attached, you can create a file system on top of theses volumes, run a database, or use them in any other way you would use a block device. EBS volumes are placed in a specific Availability Zone, where they are automatically replicated to protect you from the failure of a single component.
TLDR; A disk in the cloud that you attach to your EC2 instances
- General Purpose SSD (GP2)
- General purpose, balances both price and performance.
- Ratio of 3 IOPS per GB with up to 10,000 IOPS and the ability to burst up to 3000 IOPS for extended periods of time for volumes at 3334 GB and above
- Provisioned IOPS SSD (IO1)
- Designed for I/O intensive applications such as large relational or NoSQL databases.
- Use if you need more than 10,000 IOPS
- Provision up to 20,000 IOPS per volume
- Super high performance
- Throughput Optimized HDD (ST1)
- Big Data
- Data warehouses
- Log processing
- Cannot be a boot volume
- Cold HDD (SC1)
- Lowest cost storage for infrequently accessed workloads
- File server
- Cannot be a boot volume
- Magnetic (Standard)
- Lowest cost per GB of all EBS volume types that is bootable. Magnetic volumes are ideal for workloads where data is accessed infrequently, and applications where the lowest storage cost is important
- Termination protection is turned off by default, you MUST turn it on.
- On an EBS-backed instance, the default action is for the root EBS volume to be deleted when the instance is terminated
- EBS Root Volume of you DEFAULT AMI's cannot be encrypted. You can also use a third party tool (such as bit locker) to encrypt the root volume, or this can be done when creating AMI's (future lab) in the AWS console or using the API.
- Additional volumes can be encrypted.
A security group is a virtual firewall that's controlling traffic to your EC2 instance. When you first launch as EC2 instance you associate it to 1 or more instances. You have the ability to add rules to these security groups that allows traffic to or from these instances.
- Any security group rules apply immediately
- Security groups are STATEFUL. Inbound rules automatically add outbound rules
- All traffic is blocked by default and included through the rules. Whitelist
- All outbound traffic is allowed
- You can have multiple EC2 instances within a security group.
- You can have multiple security groups attached to EC2 instances.
- You cannot block specific IP addresses using Security Groups, use Network Access Control Lists.
- You can specify allow rules, but not deny rules.
- RAID 0 - Striped, no redundancy, good performance. If one fails, you lose all
- RAID 1 - Mirrored, redundant. If one fails, others available
- RAID 5 - Good for reads, bad for writes, AWS does not recommend ever putting RAID 5's on EBS. Strongly discouraged.
- RAID 10 - Striping & Mirrored, good redundancy, good performance.
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Problem - Taking a snapshot excludes the data held in cache by applications and the OS. This doesn't really matter on single volume, however when using multiple volumes in a RAID Array, this can be a problem due to interdependencies of the array.
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Solution - Take an application specific snapshot.
- Stop application from writing to disk.
- Flush all caches to the disk.
- How can we do this?
- Freeze the file system
- Unmount the RAID Array
- Shutting down the associated EC2 instance.
- To create a snapshot for Amazon EBS volumes that server as root devices, you should stop the instance before taking the snapshot.
- Snapshots of encrypted volumes are encrypted automatically
- Volumes restored from encrypted snapshots are encrypted automatically.
- You can share snapshots, but only if they are unencrypted.
- Said snapshots can be shared with other AWS accounts of made public
- Region
- OS
- Architecture
- Launch Permissions
- Storage for the Root Device (Root Device Volume)
- Instance Store (Ephemeral Store)
- EBS Backed Volumes
All AMIs are categorized as either backed by Amazon EBS or backed by instance store.
For EBS Volumes:
The root device for an instance launched from the AMI is an Amazon EBS volume created from an Amazon EBS snapshot.
For Instance Store Volumes:
The root device for an instance launched from the AMI is an instance store volume created from a template stored in Amazon S3.
A virtual appliance that balances the load of HTTP traffic etc. of your web application/web servers.
- Application Load Balancers
- Network Load Balancers
- Classic Load Balancers
Best suited for load balancing of HTTP(S) traffic. They operate at Layer 7 (OSI) and are application aware. The are intelligent, and you can create advanced request routing, sending specified requests to specific web servers.
Best suited for load balancing of TCP traffic where extreme performance is required. Operating at the connection level (Layer 4), Network Load Balancers are capable of handling millions of requests per second, while maintaining ultra-low latencies.
Used to load balance HTTP(S) applications and use Layer 7-specific features, such as X-Forwarded and stick-sessions. You can use strict Layer 4 load balancing for applications that rely purely on the TCP protocol.
- If no response or timeout, the ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) responds with status code 504.
- Internal Server Error type - DB Layer or Web Server Layer.
- Solution: Identify issue where failing and scale up or out where possible.
Clustered Placement Group
A cluster placement group is a grouping of instances within a single Availability Zone. Placement groups are recommended for applications that need low network latency, high network throughput, or both.
NOTE: Only a certain number instances can be launched in to a Clustered Placement Group.
Spread Placement Group
Opposite of a Clustered Placement Group. A Spread Placement Group is a group of instances that are each placed on distinct underlying hardware. Spread Placement Groups are recommended for applications that have a small number of critical instances that should be kept separate from each other.
AWS EFS is file storage service for AWS EC2 instances. Amazon EFS is easy to use and provides a simple interface that allows you to create and configure file systems quickly and easily. With AWS EFS, storage capacity is elastic, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, so your applications have the storage they need, when they need it.
- Supports the Network File System version 4 (NFSv4) protocol
- You only pay for the storage you use (no pre-provisioning required)
- Can scale up to the petabytes
- Can support thousands of concurrent NFS connections
- Data is stored across multiple AZ's within a region
- Read After Write Consistency
AWS Lambda is a compute service where you can upload your code and create Lambda function. AWS Lambda takes care of provisioning and managing the servers that you use to run the code. Worry free from OS, patching, scaling, etc.
Use Cases
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As an event-driven compute service where AWS Lambda runs your code in response to events. These events could be changes to data in an Amazon S3 bucket or an Amazon DynamoDB table.
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As a compute service to run your code in response to HTTP requests using Amazon API Gateway or API calls made using AWS SDKs.
Encapsulation of the following:
- Data Centers
- Hardware
- Assembly Code/Protocols
- High Level languages
- Operation Systems
- Application Layer/AWS API's
- AWS Lambda
- C#
- Java
- Node.js
- Python
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Number of requests
- First 1m requests are free. $0.20 per 1m requests thereafter.
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Duration
- Duration is calculated from the time your code begins execution until it returns or otherwise terminates, rounded up to the nearest 100ms. The price depends on the amount of memory you allocate to your function. You are charged $0.00001667 for every GB-second used.
- No SERVERS!!
- Continuous Scaling
- Super super super cheap