AWS EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides resizable virtual servers in the cloud. It's the foundational compute service for running applications, from simple web servers to complex distributed systems.

Core Concepts

• Instance — a virtual server with CPU, memory, storage, and networking
• AMI — Amazon Machine Image, a template for launching instances
• Instance type — hardware configuration (t3.micro, m5.xlarge, etc.)
• Security group — virtual firewall controlling inbound/outbound traffic
• Key pair — SSH authentication for Linux instances
• EBS — Elastic Block Store, persistent block storage volumes

Launching Instances

# Launch a basic EC2 instance
aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0 \