‫Been on EC2
‫in which we will create our first website on AWS.
‫So what is Amazon EC2?
‫Well, EC2 is one of the most popular of AWS' offering.
‫It is definitely used everywhere.
‫And what is it?
‫Well, it stands for Elastic Compute Cloud
‫and this is the way to do Infrastructure as a Service
‫on AWS.
‫So EC2 is not just one service.
‫It's composed of many things at a high level.
‫So you can rent virtual machines on EC2,
‫they're called EC2 instances.
‫You can store data on virtual drives or EBS volumes.
‫You can distribute load across machines,
‫Elastic Load Balancer.
‫You can scale services using an auto-scaling group or ASG,
‫and all these things, do not worry,
‫we will see in depth during this course.
‫Knowing how to use EC2 in AWS is fundamental
‫to understand how the cloud works.
‫Because as I said from before,
‫the cloud is to be able to rent these compute
‫whenever you need, on demand, and EC2 is just that.
‫So, EC2, what can we choose for our instances
‫so there're virtual server that were rent from AWS?
‫So what Operating System can we choose
‫for our EC2 instances?
‫Three options:
‫Linux, and it's going to be the most popular,
‫Windows or even Mac OS.
‫How much compute power and cores you want
‫on this virtual machine?
‫So how much CPU?
‫Then you need to choose how much random access memory
‫or RAM you want,
‫and how much storage space.
‫So for example,
‫do you want storage that is going to be attached
‫through the network
‫and we'll see about it with EBS or EFS,
‫or do you want it to be hardware attached?
‫In this case, it will be an EC2 instance store.
‫And we have a whole section on storage,
‫so don't worry about it.
‫And then finally,
‫the type of network you want to attach to your EC2 instance.
‫So, do you want a network card that is going to be fast?
‫What kind of public IP do you want?
‫And finally, we need to handle the firewall rules
‫of our EC2 instance, and that is the security group.
‫And I live, finally, finally,
‫there's the Bootstrap script to configure the instance
‫at first launch, which is called the EC2 User Data.
‫So we have lots and lots of options
‫and as you'll see in the hands-on,
‫even more options at other certification levels
‫that you need to know in EC2 instances,
‫but at a core of it what you need to remember is that
‫you can choose pretty much how you want your visual machine
‫to be and you can rent it from AWS.
‫And that is the power of the cloud.
‫You can do this by just in the blink of the eye, really.
‫So it is possible to bootstrap our instances
‫using the EC2 User Data script.
‫So what does bootstrapping mean?
‫Well, bootstrapping means launching commands when
‫the machine starts.
‫So, that script is only run once and when it first starts,
‫and then will never be run again.
‫So the EC2 User Data has a very specific purpose.
‫It is to automate boot tasks, hence the name bootstrapping.
‫So what tasks do you want to automate?
‫Usually, when you boot your instance
‫while you want to install updates, install software,
‫download common files from the Internet,
‫or anything you can think of really,
‫anything you can think of.
‫So it could be whatever you want,
‫but just know that
‫the more you add into your User Data script,
‫the more your instant has to do at boot time.
‫Simple, right?
‫By the way,
‫the EC2 User Data scripts runs with a root user.
‫So any command you have will have the pseudo rights.
‫Okay?
‫What type of instances do we get for EC2?
‫And this is an example.
‫I have hundreds and hundreds of EC2 instance types,
‫but, here are five for you.
‫So the first one is a t2 micro, very very simple.
‫It has one vCPU, one gigabyte of memory.
‫The storage is only for EBS,
‫and it has a low to moderate network performance.
‫But as soon as you increase the instance type
‫like for example if you stay in the same family,
‫so we stay in the t2 family but we go to t2.xlarge,
‫now we have access to four vCPU
‫16 megabytes of RAM,
‫gigabytes of RAM, sorry,
‫and network performance of moderate.
‫If we go to complete different new levels,
‫so c5d.4xlarge, which is a very complicated name,
‫you get 16 vCPU, so 16 cores,
‫you get 32 gigabytes of memory, so a lot more,
‫you get some storage that is attached to your EC2 instance,
‫this is where it says 400 NVMe SSD.
‫Now the network is going to get really good
‫up to 10 gigabytes,
‫as well as the bandwidth to talk to network storage.
‫And so, as you can see,
‫if you go to r5.16xlarge or m5.8xlarge,
‫again you have different characteristics.
‫So, the idea with this is that
‫you choose the kind of instance that fits best
‫your application,
‫and you can use that on the cloud on demand.
‫Okay?
‫Now, for this instance, for our course,
‫t2 micro is going to be part of the AWS free tier.
‫You can get up to 750 hours per month of t2 micro
‫which represents basically running that instance
‫continuously for a month.
‫And so this is what we'll be using in the hands-on
‫that comes in the next lecture.
‫So this was a short introduction to EC2.
‫Don't worry, it's going to get very very practical
‫very soon.
‫I will see you in the next lecture.