What is EC2?

• EC2 is one of the most popular of AWS offering
• It mainly consists in the capability of:
  • Renting virtual machines (EC2)
  • Storing data on virtual drives (EBS)
  • Distributing load across machines (ELB)
  • Scaling the services using an auto-scaling group (ASG)

Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

• An AMI is a template that contains the software configuration (operating system, application server, and applications) required to launch your instance.

Elastic Block Storage (EBS)

• AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) is Amazon's block-level storage solution used with the EC2 cloud service to store persistent data.
• This means that the data is kept on the AWS EBS servers even when the EC2 instances are shut down.
• EBS offers the same high availability and low-latency performance within the selected availability zone, allowing users to scale storage capacity at low subscription-based pricing model.
• The data volumes can be dynamically attached, detached and scaled with any EC2 instance, just like a physical block storage drive.

Security Groups (SGs)

• Security Groups are the fundamental of network security in AWS.
• They control how traffic is allowed into or out of the EC2 instance.
• It lives "outside" the EC2 instance—if traffic is blocked the EC2 instance won't even see it.
• AWS security groups (SGs) are associated with EC2 instances and provide security at the protocol and port access level.
• Each security group—working much the same way as a firewall—contains a set of rules that filter traffic coming into and out of an EC2 instance.
• Security groups are specific to a VPC. As a result, during your security groups, you must specify which VPC the SG will reside.