This chapter covers some of the fundamental building blocks of the computing category of AWS cloud services. It's hard to accomplish much in the cloud without computing resources, which gives you a place to run your code. The most common computing resource is a virtual server, and you will get a thorough introduction to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in this chapter. However, server-less environments are becoming more and more prevalent, so you will also have the opportunity to create and configure an AWS Lambda function.
Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) is by far the most utilized service in the AWS catalog, and it comes with a very rich and deep set of functionality. More than just virtual machines, EC2 provides a framework of sub-services to help you secure and manage your instances elastically, such as Elastic Load Balancing, Autoscaling, Security Groups...