Amazon EC2 Notes

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Instance Types

Vary by

• CPU
• Memory
• Storage (size and type)
• Network Performance (low,moderate,high)

organized

• T – burstable performance
• M – general purpose
• C – compute optimized
• R – memory
• X – memory
• I – storage
• D – dense storage (48TB)
• G – GPU (graphics)

enhanced networking – Single Root I/O Virtualization

• more packets per second
• lower latency
• less jitter
• c3,c4,d2,i2,m4,r3
• need correct drivers
• only on VPC instances

Amazon Machine Images (AMI)

initial software that will be on an instance

• OS
• state of patches
• application or system software

Based on x86 OSs  Linux Windows

Sources of AMIs

• published by AWs
• AWS marketplace
• Existing Instances
• uploaded virtual servers

Addressing an instance

• dns name (based on ip – public or private)
• Public ip
• EIP – Elastic IP

Initial Access

• initial access is setup by public key – key pairs
• Windows  – AWS generates a random password and the client needs the private key to decrypt it

Virtual Firewall protection

• Security groups
  • based on port protocol and source/destination
  • default deny
  • stateful
    • outgoing request is remembered so response is allowed without explicit inbound rule

Lifecycle

• launching
  • bootstrapping
    • providing code to be run at launch
    • specified in UserData
  • VM Import/export
    • can import vm as an instance
    • instances launched within AWS from AMIs cannot be exported
  • Instance metadata
    • data about the instance
    • http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/

Managing Instances

• Tagging
  • name-value pairs
• Monitoring Instances
• Cloudwatch – monitoring and alerting

Modifying an Instance

• instance type
• security group

Termination Protections

• can be enabled
• termination fails until disabled

Options

• Ondemand
  • most flexible
  • price per hour
• Reserved
  • capacity reservations for predictable workloads
  • 75% savings
  • pricing
    • all upfront
    • partial upfront
    • no upfront
• Spot
  • not time critical
  • tolerant of interruptions
  • specify price
  • runs until
    • termination
    • price goes above bid price
    • not enough  capacity to meet demand

Tenancy Options

• shared instance
  • default
  • single host – hosts many AWS clients
• dedicated instance
  • hardware dedicated to single customer
• dedicated host
  • physical server fully dedicated to single customer
  • licensing considerations

Placement Groups

• Logical grouping of instances in an availability zone
• participate in low latency, 10 Gbps networks
• instance must support enhanced networking and 10 Gbps network performance

Instance Stores

• ephemeral storage
• temporary block level storage
• data lots when
  • disk fails
  • instance stops
  • instance terminates

Amazon Elastic Block  Storage (EBS)

• automatically replicated within its availability zone
• attached only to a single instance
• types
  • Magnetic
    • 1GB – 1TB
    • data infrequently accessed
    • sequential reads
    • low cost required
    • billed on space provisioned
  • General Purpose SSD
    • 1GB – 16TB
    • 3 IOPS per GB provisioned with max at 10,000 IOPS
    • SSD under 1 TB can burst to 3000 IOPS
      • stores credits when under 1500 IOPS.
      • uses credits and can  burst to 3000 IOPS until credit runs  out
    • dev and test environments
    • billed on  space provisioned
  • Provisioned IOPS SSD
    • I/O intensive workloads
    • highest performance, and predictable
    • 4GB – 16TB
    • must choose how many IOPS
      • minimum = 30 X # GB
      • maximum = 20,000 IOPS
    • stripe multiple  volumes for larger size and performance
    • 10% of the provision IOPS performance 99.9% of the time in  a given year
    • price based on sized of provisioned space and provisioned IOPS
    • Critical business application
    • large DB workload

EBS Optimized

• additional hourly rate applied
• optimization or best performance

Protected data

• Backup/Recovery (snapshots)
  • point in time
  • incremental
  • stored in S3 pay only for storage (cannot access through client S3)
  • created immediately
  • Creating a Volume  from a snapshot
    • to use a snapshot you have to create a volume from it
    • when creating, place in Availability zone where the volume is going to be used
    • creates it immediately
  • Recovering volumes
    • detach and reattach to another instance
  • Encryption Options
    • uses AWS Key Management Services
    • a new master key will be created
    • snapshots of encrypted volumes are encrypted
    • volumes created from encrypted snapshots are encrypted