Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Beginners Certification

Welcome to the Amazon EC2 Foundations Certification course. This course provides an in–depth overview of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The EC2 service is an essential building block in becoming an AWS certified cloud practitioner. We will start with exploring key concepts relevant to EC2, followed by a hands–on practical guide to deploying compute resources on AWS.

The term “Scalable Cloud Computing” has now become synonymous with Amazon Web Services. For nearly a decade, AWS has been powering some of the world’s most popular websites and applications. Amazon EC2, is considered the computational backbone of AWS.

To illustrate how Amazon EC2 works, we explore the concept of virtualization. Virtualization is the process of creating a software–based virtual representation of a server. When we deploy an EC2 “Instance” we’re creating a virtual representation of a physical server and it’s resources. This includes: CPU, Memory (RAM), Storage, and network resources such as Bandwidth.

Similar to physical servers that you might find on–premises, virtual EC2 instances can also have different configurations. As a matter of fact, AWS offers the most comprehensive configuration options when it comes to deploying virtual servers. These configurations can easily be adapted to our resource needs, in real–time.

The level of customization a cloud provider can accommodate, will define the sophistication level of it’s overall service. Not all cloud services were created equal. AWS, is known to have the highest level of configuration options when compared to just about any other service. The AWS platform caters to both micro and enterprise level clients, using one of the most scalable and advanced virtualization infrastructures available.

Beyond the physical hardware customization and scalability, virtualization also accommodates the deployment of any operating system on the virtual machine. As you will see, we have the flexibility of deploying both Linux and Windows servers, using a variety of pre–configured virtual applications known as AMIs (Amazon Machine Images).