What is AWS EC2? Features, Benefits, and Pricing

AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) introduced in 2006, as one of the initial offerings, played a significant role in establishing AWS as a leader in cloud computing. Today, EC2 is utilized by businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. 

This blog is a comprehensive guide helping you understand AWS EC2, its features, benefits, and pricing, enabling you to maximize its potential for your business.

So, let’s get started.

What is AWS EC2?

AWS EC2 is a web service that provides highly scalable computing capacity over the cloud. It allows the launch and management of virtual servers known as instances, eliminating the need for buying and maintaining the physical servers.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud has more than 750+ instances to offer. Each instance is powered by the latest processors, pricing models, storage, networking, and more, allowing you to select the best instance that equalizes with the workload requirements. 

These on-demand EC2 instances can be scaled up and down based on the requirements. Furthermore, the AWS pricing model allows you to pay only for the computing capacity you have consumed. 

Briefly summarized, it offers the broadest range of highly reliable, secure, and scalable compute, storage, and network services you need to run cloud-native applications. 

AWS EC2 Benefits

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is one of the widely used AWS services, thanks to the following benefits:

1. Multiple Locations

Benefiting from the AWS cloud’s global infrastructure, EC2 allows you to store your virtual servers (instances) at your desired location. These instances can be stored across the regions and availability zones. You can even choose to store the instances at multiple locations, safeguarding you in the situation of location failure. Each EC2 region is guaranteed to be available 99.99% of the time. 

2. Diverse AWS EC2 Instance Types

Amazon Web Services has a diverse selection of instances suitable for varied workloads. These instances vary in terms of CPU, network capabilities, memory, and storage. Here is a list of the different AWS EC2 instance types you can choose from:

3. General Purpose

As the name suggests, the AWS EC2 general-purpose instance offers a balanced combination of memory, network, and compute resources. These instances are the best option for hosting applications that have basic resource requirements such as web servers, development & testing environments, and small to medium-sized databases.

4. Compute Optimized

AWS EC2 compute optimized instances are meant to deliver high-performance process capabilities, ideal for compute-intensive workloads. These instances are backed by high-performance processors like AWS Graviton 4, Arm-based AWS Graviton3,  4th Generation Intel Xeon, and AMD EPYC.

Compute-optimized instances are the ideal choice for applications that demand low latency, and high throughput, scientific models, gaming servers, and machine-learning interfaces. 

5. Memory Optimized

AWS EC2 memory-optimized instances are the right choice for workloads with large amounts of memory requirements, fast data retrieval, and processing time. These instances are optimized for applications such as real-time analytics tools, memory databases, scientific simulations, and more. 

6. Accelerated Computing

AWS EC2 accelerated computing instances are specialized instances capable of performing computational tasks more efficiently than traditional CPU-only instances. These instances use hardware accelerators or co-processors like Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to boost performance. Furthermore, these instances support parallel processing, allowing the management of multiple operations simultaneously.  

Accelerated computing instances are ideal choices for workloads with high processing needs, such as deep learning, complex simulations, graphics-intensive applications, and high-performance computing. 

7. Storage Optimized

AWS EC2 storage optimized instances provide high storage capabilities, enabling fast reading and writing of large volumes of data more efficiently. These instances can handle high input/output operations (IOPS) per second. They have local storage capabilities either in HDD, or SSD to ensure the local processing of data directly on the instances. 

Storage-optimized instances are ideal for big data processing, real-time data streaming, and transactional databases.

8. HPC Optimized

AWS EC2 HPC (High-Performance Computing) instances are powered by high-performance processors capable of running HPC workloads. These instances are optimized for parallel processing, allowing multiple processes to work simultaneously. 

HPC-optimized instances are valued choices for use cases like high-frequency trading algorithms, machine-learning training models, modular dynamic simulations, and more.

9. Scaling With Ease

Maintaining the availability of your application at all times is one of the most promising benefits of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling ensures that you have the correct number of EC2 instances employed to handle the varying application load. You can specify scaling policies such as CPU utilization, or request count per target to define when to add and remove instances. 

EC2 Auto Scaling allows you to create a collection of EC2 instances called Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs). These groups ask you to define the following information:

• The minimum number of instances must be running all the time.
• The maximum number of instances that can be launched.
• The average number of instances that you want to run at any given time.

EC2 Auto Scaling can automatically select the number of instances that are needed to match the real-time demand. 

For example, you have configured the ASGs as follows:

• Minimum instances: 4
• Desired instances: 6
• Maximum instances: 12

You can specify the scaling policies, like when CPU utilization exceeds 80%, the maximum number of instances should be launched to maintain the performances. Conversely, if CPU utilization goes beyond 20%, then additional instances should be removed, and minimum instances should be run.

This benefit of AWS EC2 ensures that you only pay for the number of instances actually being used. Beyond this, EC2 Auto Scaling can also provide the following benefits:

• Continuously monitoring the health of running instances to ensure impaired instances are replaced with healthy instances to ensure performance.
• It can also help in the even distribution of workloads across the instances located in multiple availability zones. 
• The Elastic Load Balancing feature ensures the even distribution of application traffic to healthy instances. 

10. Robust Security

AWS security services are designed to offer avant-garde security to protect the EC2 instances. Identify and access management services applying fine-grained access control limit the access to the necessary resources. Furthermore, by providing temporary credentials, it protects from the risks associated with long-term static credentials. Additionally, security groups, i.e. firewalls in EC2, ensure to specify the permitted inbound and outbound traffic to control the traffic reaching your instances. Network Access Control Lists (NACLs), add an additional layer of security against the unwanted traffic protecting your instance.

Amazon Web Services EC2 also applies multiple encryptions to protect the data at rest, and in transit. Security services such as Amazon EBS AES-256 encryption protect the data at rest and leverage TLS (Transport Layer Security) to protect the data at transit. Additionally, the instance-to-instance communication is also encrypted leveraging the Nitro System to protect sensitive data.  

AWS cloud security posture is further strengthened by isolation techniques to ensure fault tolerance, memory scrubbing to protect against data leakage, and improved incident response.  Isolation techniques such as hypervisor isolation ensure each EC2 runs in its own isolated environment. 

11. Integration With a Rich Ecosystem of Services

AWS has a rich ecosystem containing services such as networking, storage, and AWS migration. This array of services can be easily integrated with the EC2, for example, AWS Lambda for serverless computing, S3 for storage, Amazon RDS for database management, and more. 

12. Growing List of Operating Systems and Software

AWS offers a wide and growing selection of operating systems including:

• Amazon Linux
• Ubuntu
• Windows
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
• Debian
• CentOS
• Fedora
• FreeBSD
• Oracle Linux

The list of operating systems is continually evaluating, and evolving to offer the most choice possible to customers. In addition, the AWS allows you to install and run the several software applications:

• Web servers
• Database Management Systems
• Container Orchestration
• Machine learning frameworks 

Amazon Machine Image (AMI), a preconfigured template with all the necessary information setup of an EC2 server like OS, software applications, or pre-installed applications. It allows you to configure the EC2 instance according to your requirements. AWS itself provides AMIs, or you can build your custom AMI. This allows you to set up an EC2 instance, and replicate a similar configuration across all the instances you need.

AWS EC2 Cost: How Much Does It Cost?

Amazon EC2 has multiple purchase models allowing customers to choose the most appropriate model to pay for the instances. Here we have outlined all the AWS EC2 cost models, helping you to figure out which one is the right choice for you:

1. Free Tier

It allows you to leverage the EC2 at no cost for 12 months. In the free tier, the usage is limited to 750 hours each month.

2. AWS EC2 On Demand Pricing

On-demand pricing allows you to use the computing capacity with no prior, and long-term commitment. The prices are calculated based on the compute time used by the hours or seconds taking reference to the following factors:

• Compute time 
• Instance type
• Number of instances
• Region 

AWS EC2 on-demand pricing model is the most appropriate choice for unpredictable workloads that demand temporary resources.

3. AWS EC2 Saving Plans Pricing

These are the flexible savings pricing plans that offer significant cost-saving opportunities when you commit to a consistent level of usage over time i.e. one or three-year term. Saving plans can help you save up to 72% compared to AWS EC2 on-demand pricing. 

Amazon EC2 offers three different types of saving plans:

• Compute saving plans: They can be applied to any instance usage, requiring no specific instance family, size, region, or operating systems. This plan is an ideal choice for businesses with varying workloads that require instance changes, and regions.  These plans offer 66% of the savings compared to on-demand costs. 
• EC2 instance saving plans: They can be applied only on the commitment of individual instance families in a region, not being influenced by availability zone, size, and OS. These plans offer a savings of 72%.
• SageMaker savings plans: This plan is specifically applied to the Sagemaker usage, and reduces the cost by 64%. 

4. AWS EC2 Spot Instances Pricing

Spot instances allow you to utilize the unused EC2 capacity at discounted prices up to 90% of on-demand prices. The pricing of spot instances are set by AWS on the basis of demand and supply, 

Do You Want to Get Started With AWS EC2?

Starting with AWS EC2 is a simple process; all it needs is an AWS account and setting up the instances, like choosing the region, instance configuration, configuring security, and some additional steps. For additional support and specialized guidance, consider connecting with AWS experts like Cyntexa. We’ll help you to leverage the capabilities of AWS EC2 to the fullest extent possible.