EC2: Elastic Compute Cloud & Virtual Servers

Instance types, AMIs, SSH Key Pairs, and Security Group firewalls

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Amazon EC2 provides resizable virtual computing capacity in the cloud, allowing you to launch Linux or Windows virtual machines (instances) in minutes.

EC2 Instance Anatomy

AMI (Amazon Machine Image): Pre-configured operating system template (Ubuntu, Amazon Linux 2023, Windows Server).

Instance Types: Categorized by resource ratios (e.g. t4g.micro for general burstable, c7g for compute-heavy, r7g for memory-intensive).

Security Groups: Virtual stateful firewalls controlling inbound and outbound network traffic to instances.

EBS (Elastic Block Store): Persistent high-performance network-attached SSD block storage volumes attached to instances.

Connecting to EC2 via SSH

Try It Yourself »

# Ensure SSH private key has correct restricted permissions
chmod 400 my-key-pair.pem

# Connect to EC2 instance using public IP or DNS
ssh -i "my-key-pair.pem" ubuntu@ec2-54-210-45-12.compute-1.amazonaws.com

# Once inside: Update packages and install Nginx
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y nginx
sudo systemctl start nginx

Connects securely via asymmetric key pairs without transmitting passwords.

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Test Yourself With Exercise

+15 XP

What acts as a virtual stateful firewall controlling inbound and outbound traffic to an EC2 instance?

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