What is EC2 AWS and How To Start? Let's dive in!

What is AWS EC2?

Have you ever thought about hosting a WordPress site, a backend service or a database in AWS? Then you've got a Amazon EC2, which is perfectly suitable for you. But what exactly is EC2 and how do you get started in AWS? We've got this post for you to get a grasp about how it works and how to get started!

Well, first of all - EC2 is a service that Amazon Web Services provide to set up virtual machines on their servers. This is called Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). Each virtual machine on EC2 is called an instance. Amazon provides the option to choose between hundreds of different instances. Therefore, the user can choose exactly what they need and have the best possible experience.

Where to begin?

So you have your backend API set up locally and want to have it live in the cloud. The first thing you have to do is to set up your EC2 Service, which is one of AWS services that they provide and Launch an Instance.
There are tons of different Amazon Machine Image's (AMI) which are just software templates for your virtual machine.

For simplicity, just select Ubuntu Server and you will see a bunch of Instance types - now its getting technical and you have to know the the purpose of your usage before to choose the correct one. We've got more info about how to choose the right instance on the bottom of the page

Select t2.micro which is free tier eligible and press Launch. You'll get a Key-pair values to get the connection possibility via a SSH client such as PuTTY. Just generate new key-pair and include it when you SSH through PuTTY.
This time, we'll use AWS own console to connect - so we wont need to use any keys. On your EC2 instance list you'll see your newly created EC2 instance and when you click on the Instance ID, you will see your connection details.

Now, let's try it out.

Click on the "Connect" - button on the top right corner and connect to the EC2 instance through AWS online console and you'll see the VM appear in a new tab - welcome to your instance.

To get some simple results, we will set up a simple web server with Ngnix Web Server in 3 simple commads.

First of, start with updating your Ubuntu software.
• >> sudo apt update

Second, install the Apache2 with the needed dependencies.
• >> sudo apt install nginx

Third step, set up your firewall settings to accept HTTP requests.
• >> sudo ufw allow 'Nginx HTTP'

Now when your server is up and running you will be able to connect to it by requesting the public IP (you can find it below the Instance command or just your EC2 instance under "Public IPv4".
But when you request this adress, you wont get far (yet). Because your EC2 has what's called security group.

This is very important so you can have your EC2 instances private or public, for different ports - and for this purpose you want to have the HTTP inbound port active. So we've got this part left and we're up and running.

Enter the security group and you'll see "Edit inbound rules".

Add a new rule with these credentials
[ Type = HTTP ] [ CIDR blocks = 0.0.0.0/0 ] Which means, accept all IP's and hit "Save rule".

Now refresh your public IPv4 domain in the URL and you will see the ngnix server running!

So how do we choose the right EC2 instance type?

Well, when you are setting up your instances it can get confusing when choosing an instance. Especially since there are so many options to choose from. With EC2, you can choose different mixes of RAM, CPU, storage, and network capabilities.

If you are looking to host a small to a mid-size database, you should consider the M1 and M3 family of EC2. These virtual machines start from 1 CPU with 2GB Ram and go up to 8 CPUs and 30GB of RAM. These are optimal to run backend servers for enterprise applications.

The C1 and CC2 instances are ideal if you are looking to run CPU-intensive applications. These instances provide the lowest cost per CPU core. Therefore, you can use a large number of CPUs to handle applications such as web servers, encoding, and batch processing.

If you are looking for storage optimized EC2 instances, you should look for the HI1 and HS1. These provide extremely high-speed storage performance and are optimal for the deployment of large NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, as well as Hadoop clusters. The HS1 EC2 can provide storage of up to 48TB, divided over 24 hard-drives for the best concurrent performance.