What is EC2 in amazon web service(AWS)? How it works and what are the benefits?

Deployment is a significant step after Development. It becomes difficult to predict the environment requirements, storage, and computing power also it is hard to manage the operating systems, networks, etc when it comes to deploying a service. Here comes AWS to help you with its another amazing service - AWS EC2.

What is AWS EC2?

EC2 stands for Elastic Cloud Compute, it's a service offered by Amazon Web Service (AWS). It provides Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) which offers secure, auto-scalable computing capacity in the cloud. With EC2, Developers can have complete control of scalable computing resources.

EC2 is one of the most used AWS services as it lets users develop, launch, and manage compute instances, at the desired time and allows you to pay only for capacity and servers that you actually use. You don't need to worry about servers as AWS takes care of everything for you.

What is an instance?

A virtual server used in AWS EC2 to run an application is called an instance. You can also assume an instance as a small part of a computer that has its own operating system, storage, network, etc. And you can have various small computers on a single machine.

What are the benefits of using AWS EC2?

Auto-scaling: As with most of the other AWS services EC2 is also an auto-scaled service. it means a business can provide resources to their customers according to their needs. Simply EC2 can either scales up or scale down as the increase or decrease in demand.

Pay-as-you-go: Just suppose your company needs 100 servers 6 days of the week but on Sunday you just need 10 servers. But you are using EC2 as your server from AWS so your company just needs to pay for those 10 servers not usually as for 100 servers.

Simply you are charged by the hour, and you have to pay only for how much you have used. Even when you use EC2 instances for a few minutes/hours, you only need to pay for those few minutes/hours and nothing more. You can also choose instances according to your needs. EC2 provides multiple plans such as Reserved Instances, On-Demand, Spot Instances, etc.

Secure: AWS EC2 works in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud(VPC) to provide a secure and robust networking functionality for your computing resources. If you are not using a default Virtual Private Cloud(VPC) you must create one first and launch your instances into that VPC to use advanced networking features.

All the compute instances are located in a VPC with an IP range that you define. You also decide which instances are to remain private and which has to be exposed. Thus you can say your data is completely secure with EC2.

Reliability: Amazon Web Service(AWS) is available in 20 worldwide regions with 61 availability zones across the world which makes it more reliable for your business. AWS EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where the replacement of instances is easily and rapidly possible. Also, you can save multiple copies of your application in multiple availability zones(AZ) so that if one data center fails or somehow if it loses data, the application will not fail.

Easy to start and Completely controlled: AWS EC2 is easy to start and it remains completely in your control. You can simply get started with it by visiting the AWS Management console and choosing an OS according to your choice.