About EC2 and its Suported Storage, Hosts Types, Network Interface and IP Address

List of Topics

1) What is EC2
2) Supported Storage
3) Instance Purchasing options
5) Way to access EC2
6) Instance type and Family
7) General Information
9) Security Group

10) Types of network interfaces
11) Charging

1) What is EC2 - Virtual servers in the cloud is known as instances

2) AMI (Amazon Machine Image) - Pre-configured templates for your instances, like an ISO image. 

3) Supported Storage
Below are the list of storage options of EC2. In the below list S3 is explained seperately in a different post. You can see a Post named S3 in blog home page. Remaining are explained here.

a) Instance Store (Temporary Storage)
b) EBS Store (Permanent Storage) 
c) S3 Store
d) EFS

3) Instance Purchasing Options

1)  On-Demand instances — Pay, by the hour, for the instances that you launch.

2) Reserved Instances — Purchase, at a significant discount, instances that are always available, for a term from one to three years.

3) Scheduled Instances — Purchase instances that are always available on the specified recurring schedule, for a one-year term.

4) Spot instances — Bid on unused instances, which can run as long as they are available and your bid is above the Spot price, at a significant discount.

5) Dedicated hosts — Pay for a physical host that is fully dedicated to running your instances, and bring your existing per-socket, per-core, or per-VM software licenses to reduce costs.

6) Dedicated instances — Pay, by the hour, for instances that run on single-tenant hardware.

AWS EC2 has 2 different type of instances: Fixed Performance Instances(e.g. M3, C3 etc) and Burstable Performance Instances (e.g. T2). Fixed Performance Instances provides a consistent CPU performance whereas Burstable Performance Instances provide a baseline CPU performance under normal workload. But when the workload increases Burstable Performance Instances have the ability to burst, i.e. increase the CPU performance.

5) How to Access EC2 - AWS CLI, EC2 CLI and AWS Tools

6) Instance types & Family

EC2 instances are mainly classified based on below three resources

a) CPU
b) Memory
c) Network

Instance Family

a) General Purpose          - T2, M4, M3
b) Compute Optimized     - C4, C3
c) Memory Optimized       - R3, X1
d) Accelerated Optimized - C2, G2
e) Storage Optimized        - I2 
f) GPU Enabled                - G2, P2

6) Resource Location

a) Regional resources - AMI, EIP, Security Group and EBS Snapshot
b) AZ                            - EBS Volume and EC2 Instances

7) General Information

a) Static IP address for dynamic Cloud computing is known as Elastic IP

b) When an  Instance is Terminated by default its root EBS volumes are also deleted unless "DeleteOnTermination" is set to false.

c) Each Region is completely independent. Each AZ is completely isolated, but the AZ's are connected through low latency links

d) EC2 Snapshot - Only accessible from EC2 API

e) Reverse DNS for ElP is configurable

Enhance Networking - Supported only in VPC, there is no additional charge for enhanced networking. Need to launch Specific AMI

Reserved Instances

AWS charges 12% of total upfront price for selling Reserved instances. Reserved instances can be migrated between availability zones in the same region.Reservered instances can be used for Auto Scaling

Limits

Number of EIP/Per Region -  5

9) Security Group - An Additional Way of Filtering packet's at AWS level. 

Security group is a virtual firewall that controls the traffic for one or more instances. While launching an instance, you must associate your instance atleast with one security group. Security group can be modified at any time and changes are automatically immediately applied to all instances that are associated with the security group.

By default, security groups allow all outgoing traffic and no Inbound Traffic. You can’t create deny rules with Security group. Security group is specific to VPC. While launching an instance you must specify a security group for that VPC.

Multiple security groups can be assigned to an instance.

10) Types Network Interface's

In Amazon we have two types on network interfaces 1) Primary and 2) ENI which is explained below. 

Primary network interface - Every instance in a VPC has a default network interface, called the primary network interface(eth0). You cannot detach a primary network interface from an instance

Elastic Network Interface (ENI) - An virtual network interface that you can attach to an instance in VPC. It is available for the instance's in VPC only.  If you require a persistent public IP address that can be associated to and from instances as. An security group gets attached to ENI

(i)  Warm attach (When instance is Stopped)

(ii)  Hot attach (When instance is running)

(iii) Cold attach (While instance is being Started)

11) Charging

(i)  On-demand - Payment is based on hourly usage. Partial hour usage will be converted into full hour and billed. Billing cycle will start when the instance starts running and charges will be incurred. Stopping and Not running won't incur any charges. For example if you stop and start multiple times in a single hour then after every stop and start new billing cycle starts so you will be billed multiple times.

(ii)  Reserved -  Reserving option is available for 1 Year and 3 year, and three three types of payment available for reserved instances
    a) Full Upfront -  Full payment while purchasing the reserved instance

    b) Half Upfront - Partial payment While purchasing remaining payment as a part of every month bill.

    c) No upfront - No payment during purchasing and the total amount will be paid as a part of monthly bill

Capacity is guaranteed in reserved instance. At any point of time you will be getting your instance and we wont get any error like capacity utilized. We can resell the instance but there is no refund for the selling of reserved instance.

(iii) Scheduled Reservation - in case of not wanted to, 1 year term define the frequency, lesser than on demand.

(iv) Spot instances  - Spot instances will be started based on the bid pricing. And instances will be terminated with 2 minutes of notice period. Last partial hour is not charged. 

Spot block Option - While submitting the bid if we enable this option AWS won't terminate the instance during that duration irrespective of the price of the instance. Maximum duration for this option is max 6 hours.

(iv) Dedicates hosts  -