Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Cloud computing solutions are more accessible than ever before and as the initial concerns about cloud technology and security dissipate with more advanced cloud based services, more and more Canadian organizations are integrating cloud technology into their day to day operations.

One organization that has taken a large role in providing cloud based services is Amazon through Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

Commonly referred to simply as Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is the main component of Amazon's cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services or AWS. The service makes it possible for developers to enhance Web scale computing and offer resizable compute capacity.

Amazon's EC2 Web service allows to user to gain access to virtual computers and allows them to run internal computer applications that can be scaled to a company’s specific needs. In this sense, they can develop, launch, manage and delete server instances as require and only pay for active servers. Users have complete control and have access to developer tools to create applications within Amazons computing environment.

EC2 Features and capabilities:

Amazon EC2

• Multiple Locations: Companies have the ability to place instances in multiple locations with Amazon EC2. By creating and launching instances in multiple availability zones, companies have the ability to protect their applications from failing.
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS): This feature provides storage for the EC2 instances, which exists independently of the virtual machines. When the EBS is utilized, companies only have to pay for the storage resources that are used while maintaining virtual machines.
• Elastic IP addresses: These are specifically designed for dynamic cloud computing. Companies have the ability to control IP addresses and mask instance failure by remapping an elastic IP address to a replacement instance.
• Load balancing: This automatically manages and effectively distributes application traffic across a number of EC2 instances. This allows companies to have fewer issues managing traffic and increase fault tolerance capabilities.
• Automatic scaling: Companies have the ability to scale their EC2 to meet their specific business and computing requirements. Therefore, when demand goes up, EC2 will automatically scale its resources to accommodate additional traffic and cloud resources.
• Virtual private cloud: This allows companies to connect current network and system configurations to isolated and firewall-protected AWS resources through a virtual private network connection to manage firewalls, security, and intrusion systems.
• Virtual machine import: Companies have the ability to import virtual machine images from their networks to EC2 instances.
• CloudWatch: This feature allows companies monitor all of their cloud resources and applications, especially EC2. Companies can look at overall performance and traffic patterns, and it provides statistics that can be used to make EC2 more efficient.

How to use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

1. Select a pre-configured image. Companies also have the ability to create an Amazon Machine Image. This image will contact your company’s libraries, data, application, and configuration settings.
2. Set your access and security settings
3. Select the operating system you want to use
4. Choose which virtual machine (or instances) you want
5. Choose settings for your instances
6. Only pay for the resources that your company uses