If you are new to Cloud Computing and Amazon Web Services the choice of options can be very confusing & overwhelming. Once you get used to it you won’t look back but it does take some time. We suggest you work with an AWS consultant or use some great applications to make your life easier. This will be covered in future posts.

In this 3 part series, we will cover the types of Compute services you can purchase and provide some recommendations on how best to deploy and manage your services. Amazon call their Cloud Servers EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

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Important Concepts

Let’s start with some concepts, just to make sure that we are all on the same page.

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a template that defines your operating environment, including the operating system. A single AMI can be used to launch one or thousands of instances.

Instances provide compute power and are the fundamental building blocks. Instances are created by launching an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) on a particular instance type. You can scale the number of instances you are running up or down on demand, either manually or automatically, using Auto Scaling.

Instance Types comprise various combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity and give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your applications. Each instance type has one or more size options that address different workload sizes. For the best experience, you should launch on instance types that are the best fit for your applications.

Instance Families are collections of instance types designed to meet a common goal. To make it easier for you to select the best option for your applications, Amazon EC2 instance types are grouped together into families based on target application profiles.

In part 2 we will discuss Instance Types & the advantages of each. It will cover “On Demand”, “Reserved” and “Spot” instances.