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Book Overview & Buying
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Table Of Contents
AWS for System Administrators - Second Edition
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In the previous chapters, we set up our network in the cloud. But, so far, this virtual private cloud (VPC) is pretty empty. In this chapter, we will fill our data center in the cloud with virtual machines, called instances in AWS terminology, by using the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.
Amazon EC2 was one of the first AWS services to be introduced. In a nutshell, it offers the ability to deploy compute capacity in the form of virtual machines, called instances, in the cloud. The keyword in the service description is elastic. Instead of requiring you to rent a virtual machine for a set term, such as one year, EC2 lets you spin up and down new instances as you need them. This enables your application to handle changes in demand smoothly and only pay for the amount of compute you have consumed. This pay-as-you-go model is the basis of the cloud. This elasticity not only extends to the number of instances (the horizontal scaling)...