Compute Services

Amazon Web Service's (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is designed to replicate the datacenter/server room experience as closely as possible. This chapter explores the tools and practices used to deploy powerful and cost‐effective compute solutions in the cloud. An EC2 instance may only be a virtualized and abstracted subset of a physical server, but it behaves just like the real thing. The state of a running EC2 instance can be managed in a number of ways. Terminating the instance will shut it down and cause its resources to be reallocated to the general AWS pool. AWS resource tags can be used to label everything users will ever touch across their AWS account— they're certainly not restricted to just EC2. Storage drives (or volumes as they're described in AWS documentation) are for the most part virtualized spaces carved out of larger physical drives.