EC2

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

• Basic Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) product on AWS
• AZ resilient: AZ fails, EC2 instance fails
• customization
  • multiple instance types (sizes) available
  • storage option: on-host storage or Elastic Block Store (EBS)
• billed per second for compute and storage
• EC2 instance states
  • running: charged for compute, storage, traffic
  • stopped: instance is not running; charged for storage (and Elastic IP, if one is associated)
  • terminated: EC2 instance and its volume have been deleted (NOT reversible)
• Amazon Machine Image
  • used to create EC2 instance
  • can be created from an existing EC2 instance
  • contains
    • attached permissions (e.g. public, implicitly allow owner, explicit allow)
    • root volume
    • block device mapping: how volumes are set up within OS
• connection methods
  • EC2 Instance Connect (in-browser)
  • Session Manager (fullscreen in-browser): requires special configuration (e.g., instance IAM profile that grants access to SSM)
  • RDP (Windows)
  • SSH (Linux or Windows)
    • generate private key beforehand and download (only available during key creation on AWS)
    • Windows: SSH key → get administrator password → RDP

Create Key Pair

• Network & Security → Key Pairs → Create key pair
• Choose ED25519 unless instance doesn’t support it

Create instance

• EC2 → Instances → Launch an instance
• Choose AMI (e.g. Amazon Linux)
• Choose VPC, subnet (no pref is OK)
• public IP is free
• security group: akin to mini-firewall, have to create one if none exists, default settings is fine
• wait until status checks pass

Delete instance

• Terminate instance
• The attached EBS volume should be automatically deleted
• Delete security group (wait until instance finishes terminating)