AWS • Cloud Infrastructure
AWS EC2: From Launching an Instance to Production-Ready Infrastructure
A practical guide to understanding Amazon EC2, networking, security, storage, monitoring and the operational practices required to run reliable infrastructure.
Introduction
Amazon EC2 is one of the core services used to run workloads in AWS. It provides virtual compute capacity that can be provisioned and managed according to the requirements of an application or infrastructure environment.
However, launching an EC2 instance is only the beginning. A reliable production environment also requires networking, access control, storage, monitoring, automation and proper operational practices.
In this article, we will start with the fundamentals of Amazon EC2 and gradually move towards the components and practices involved in running EC2-based infrastructure in real-world environments.
What is Amazon EC2?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, commonly known as EC2, is an AWS service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
Instead of purchasing and maintaining physical servers, organizations can provision virtual servers in AWS and configure them according to their workload requirements.
An EC2 instance can host applications, web servers, APIs, databases, monitoring components, CI/CD workloads and many other types of services.