Let's dive deeper into virtual servers on AWS. The service is called Amazon EC2, which stands for Elastic Compute Cloud. An individual virtual server that you launch is called an EC2 instance.
Think of an EC2 instance as your own personal computer, but it lives in an AWS data center.
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Have you ever used remote desktop to connect to another computer? It's a similar idea.
To create an EC2 instance, you first choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). An AMI is a template that contains the operating system (like Linux or Windows) and other software. It's like choosing the base model of a computer before you customize it.
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Why is using a pre-configured template faster than setting everything up from scratch?
Next, you select an instance type. This determines the hardware of your virtual server, such as its processing power (CPU) and memory (RAM). AWS offers hundreds of instance types optimized for different tasks.
For example, some are for general use, while others are built for memory-intensive or high-performance computing jobs.
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What kind of task needs a lot of memory (RAM)?
Instance types are grouped into families. For example, the 't' family offers general-purpose, burstable performance at a low cost, making it great for development. The 'c' family is optimized for compute-intensive workloads.
Choosing the right family and size is a key skill for balancing performance and cost.
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If you were running complex scientific simulations, which family might you look at first?
For security, EC2 uses key pairs to prove your identity when you connect to an instance. A key pair consists of a public key that AWS stores, and a private key file that you store securely. It's like having a digital key instead of a password.
