Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Elastic Block Store
Ben Piper, David Clinton · 2019
This chapter explores the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) tools and practices which are used to leverage the power of the EC2 ecosystem. Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is designed to replicate the data center or server room experience as closely as possible. At the center of it all is the EC2 virtual server, known as an instance. An EC2 instance may only be a virtualized and abstracted subset of a physical server, but it behaves just like the real thing. It'll have access to storage, memory, and a network interface, and its primary drive will come with a fresh and clean operating system running. It's up to you to decide what kind of hardware resources you want your instance to have, what operating system and software stack you'd like it to run, and, ultimately, how much you'll pay for it.