Amazon EC2 and Compute Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing platform offered by Amazon. It provides a wide range of cloud-based services, including compute, storage, networks, databases, data analytics, machine learning (ML), and other functionality that can be used to build scalable and flexible applications. We will start our Amazon cloud learning journey from the AWS compute services—specifically, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which was one of the most basic and earliest cloud services in the world.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• The history of computing: How the first computer evolved from physical to virtual and led to cloud compute
• Amazon Global Cloud Infrastructure: Where all the AWS global cloud services are based
• Building our first EC2 instances in the Amazon cloud: Provision EC2 instances in the AWS cloud, step by step
• Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) and Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs): The framework providing EC2 services elastically
• AWS compute – from EC2 to containers to serverless: Extend from EC2 to other AWS compute services, including Elastic Container Service (ECS), Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Lambda

By following the discussions in this chapter, you will be able to grasp the basic concepts of cloud computing, AWS EC2, and compute services, and gain hands-on skills in provisioning EC2 and compute services. Practice questions are provided to assess your knowledge level, and further reading links are included at the end of the chapter.