Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon 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.

We are working from last 10 years in IT I remember time where if we needed a new Active Directory Server or a new SQL Server we have to go to HP or go to DELL order new servers. we then had to get deliver to our data centers. we had to get racked. we had to do the networking setup them the internet accessible etc and you know your provisioning time should be anywhere from 5 to 10 business days.

Then i started public cloud and was really exciting to see the capabilities of cloud in step having of 5 to 10 days lead time you would reduce to literally just couple of minutes you can have that server up and running so that's really how cloud computing change the IT industry in the last 5 to 10 years so Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios. So we just look at the first section the advantage of the cloud computing is utility based model you can pay only by the hour. If you want to spin up the development environment and just test on it and then terminate you only pay for 1 or 2 hours the environment is live the old model way you would buy the server hardware you would be stuck with it.

Elastic Compute Cloud Pricing Options

1. Free Tier you get 735 hours free on certain micro instances.
2. On Demand Which allow you to pay a fixed rate by the hour with no commitment.
3. Reserved Which provide you with a capacity reservation, and offer a significant discount on the hourly charge for an instance. Then you have 1 Year or 3 Year Terms so reserved just saying i need 10 servers of this size and i am willing to pay either up-front contractual willing to commit for 1 to 3 years and if you do use reserved instances then you get massive discounts compared with on demand.
4. Spot This is enable you to bid whatever price you want to pay for instance capacity, providing for even greater savings if your applications have flexible start and end times.

Elastic Compute Cloud On Demand vs Reserved vs Spot

1. On Demand Instances
   • Users that want the low cost and flexibility of Amazon EC2 without any up-front payment or long-term commitment.
   • Applications with short term, spike, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted.
   • Applications being developed or tested on Amazon EC2 for the first time.
2. Reserved Instances
   • Applications with steady state or predictable usage so reserved might be your 3 or 4 web servers that you always want to turned on and then your on demand instances might be is the part of an auto scaling event.
   • Applications that require reserved capacity.
   • Users able to make upfront payment to reduce their total computing costs even further.
3. Spot Instances
   • Applications that have flexible start and end times.
   • Applications that are only feasible at very low compute prices.
   • Users with urgent computing needs for large amounts  of additional capacity.

Elastic Compute Cloud On Demand Instances**

1. General Purpose Instances
2. Compute Optimized Instances
   • Compute Intensive Applications
3. Memory Optimized Instances
   • Database & Memory Caching Applications
4. GPU Instances Instances
   • High Performance Parallel Computing (eg Hadoop)
5. Storage Optimized Instances
   • Data warehousing and Parallel Computing

Local Instance Storage vs Elastic Block Storage

1. Local Instance Storage: Data stored on a local instance store will persist only as long as that instance is alive. So you terminate that Instances you loose all the data on that virtual hardware.
2. Elastic Block Storage Backed Storage: Data that is stored on an Amazon Elastic Block Storage volume will persist independently of the life of the instance.

Storage backed by Elastic Block Storage

1. Provisioned IOPS Solid State Drive
   • Designed for I/O intensive applications such as large relational or No-SQL databases.
2. General purpose Solid State Drive
   • Designed for 99.999% availability.
   • Ratio of 3 IOPS per GB, offer single digit millisecond latency, and also have the ability to burst up to 3000 IOPS for short periods.
3. Magnetic
   • Lowest cost per gigabyte of all Elastic Block Storage volume types. Magnetic volumes are ideal for workloads where data is accessed infrequently, and applications where the lowest storage cost is important.