The Lowdown on AWS EC2 Management

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a web service which is designed to make cloud computing simpler. It eliminates your need to invest in hardware up front by providing virtual computing environments, known as instances so that you can develop and deploy applications faster. It provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It allows you to quickly scale up and down, as your computing requirements change. It provides you with an auto scaling feature, which helps you to maintain availability of your EC2 instance by scaling up and down depending on its needs in order to maximize performance and minimize cost. Using Amazon EC2 you can launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage.

Benefits of using Amazon EC2

1. Reliable and Secure : It works in conjunction with Amazon VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your compute resources. It runs on Amazon network infrastructure and data centers and provides 99.99 % availability.
2. Integrated : It is integrated with Amazon S3, Amazon RDS and Amazon VPC to provide a complete, secure solution for cloud computing.
3. Flexible Hosting Services: It allows you to select the configuration based on your requirement and your choice. You can select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size for your application.

Competitors and uses:

Amazon has Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Compute as the two neck-to-neck competitors in the market. Like Amazon EC2, Google has GCP’s Compute Engine and Azure has Virtual Machine Sale sets for scalable computing on demand.

Among the three service providers Amazon has the biggest storage platform, however, services provided by Azure and Google are also considered as reliable and respectable but they are nowhere close to Amazon.

Pricing Comparison:

Key function of Cloud services id storage function, comparing three in terms of storage:

Uses:

1. Test Environment: Without taking the hassle of purchasing a different set of hardware and setting a test environment, a company can simply use Amazon EC2 and choose the configuration based on your requirement and set up your own test environment within minutes.
2. Offsite Backups: Backups with Amazon EC2 are highly secure and reliable. It regularly backup your EBS Volume with the help of EBS Snapshots, and create an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) from your instance for future use. This is manual way of taking backup, however there are methods available for automated EC2 instance backup.

Security issues:

Amazon EC2 works with Amazon VPC to provide security features. Your compute instances are located in virtual private server with a range that you specify. It is depend on you which instances are exposed to the internet and which private.

You need to create a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), if you don’t have a default VPC and then launch instances into that VPC to leverage advanced networking features such as private subnets, outbound security group filtering, network ACLs and Dedicated Instances.

However, even after a secure and strong network there are some security issues that comes with AWS EC2 Management:

VPC security groups allow inbound traffic from any IP address: AWS security groups is like an firewall which control the traffic allowed into a group of instances. In order to keep your instance protected only some IP ranges should be specified for a security group and only needed ports should be exposed. Leaving a security group open to all ports and all IP addresses provides a large attack surface to the attacker.

Network ACLs allow All Inbound Traffic: This is an optional layer of security that control traffic coming in and going out of a subnet. If NACL is open to all ports and IP addresses create your own restrictive rules to allow only the appropriate inbound traffic.

Pricing:

There are four different ways to pay for Amazon EC2 instances:

1. On-Demand Instances: Pay for compute capacity by per hour or per second depending on which instances you run. You need to pay for as long as your machine is functioning.
2. Reserved Instance: In comparison to on-demand instances pricing, reserved instances provide you a discount upto 75%. These type of instances are good for long term contracts. In this type of instances you are buying this for a limited period of time in which you can run it for 365 days a year.
3. Spot Instances: These instances are much cheaper, it allows you to request spare Amazon EC2 computing capacity for up to 90% off the On-Demand price. As the name suggests, they are purchased by the hour, and is used at the time of spinning up the machine. These type of instances can be used for applications that have flexible start and end times.
4. Dedicated Hosts: It is a fully dedicated physical server for your use, it helps you to reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses.

For more detail on Amazon pricing, click here.

To conclude, Amazon EC2 offers you a platform to maximise the usage of cloud computing platform. In comparison to other cloud service providers it offers you services which are inexpensive and scalable. It is suited for multiple uses in your organisation ranging from data backup to developing test environment and many more.