EC2 instantes are the equivalent of Amazon AWS for Virtual Servers offering the biggest set of possibilities to combine CPU, RAM and a separate storage alternatives from small sizes just to process to instances dedicated to storage and data management.
Also AWS provide a robust framework to manage network access and network configuration with possibility to create subnets to separate business areas in the same account and protect data, also using a firewall out of the box reducing the impact of DoS attacks and reusing rules with small effort.
Allocation of public IP addresses and DNS management is simple and add a lot of value to the final solution.
In network space, AWS offer the posibility to create virtual private networks, that act like a private cloud to communicate and protect in different stages the servers created as EC2 instances, an excellent usage of this concept of virtual networks is to create separate environments for SIT, UAT and Production, in order to avoid mixes that could affect the final result in production environments.
Other awesome feature that offera EC2 is the posibility to create templates of a particular instance, this feature, could be use as an alternative to easy create servers to solve particular problems that let you escalate horizontaly, adding more instances to process a big load of information, also AWS offers especialized load balancing services called Elastic Load Balancing, that let you manage multiples instances to according with the load received and being billed using the low cost instances alternatives.
The EC2 instances combined with the other services of AWS cloud let design a top end solution to cover almost all business requirements, giving infinite power to manage intricate business logic and non functional requirements.
EC2 offers a practical set of billing schemas that help the customers, developers, students and bloggers use the platform without fell that are paying to much for it.
- On demand instances billed by hour is a good solution for projects that are starting and need to setup development, testing and first versions of production environments.
- Spot instances that let use take advantage of off pike times and low cost platform to process high volumes of information paying lower rates is simple to manage and implement.
- Long term instances could manage contracts with and without upfront payments for more than 1 year ideal for production environments of applications already established.
EC2 is equivalent to Google virtual servers or Digital Ocean droplets, in my perspective, AWS EC2 Instances are more flexible and powerfull than the other ones because shows a clear separation between the processing unit and the storage.
