This is part 1 of a 4 part series on EC2.

Part 1 – EC2 Background

What is EC2?

EC2, or ‘Elastic Compute Cloud’ is a primary component of AWS (‘Amazon Web Services’).  EC2 is Amazon’s market offering for cloud computing.  EC2 allows individuals and organizations the ability to run a full instance of their favorite version of Linux or Windows on Amazon’s gear – the same gear, ostensibly, that runs Amazon.com itself.  Users are given the opportunity to host their systems, applications, and files in Amazon’s data centers, on Amazon’s bandwidth and Internet connectivity, and run everything on Amazon’s server hardware (including redundant storage, power, etc.).

What is an AMI?

EC2 is primarily competing with the colocation and shared hosting providers.  Users that pick EC2 typically do so because of the previously mentioned platform benefits, as well as it’s extreme flexibility in deployment capabilities.  Unlike traditional colocation or shared hosting, where putting 30 new servers into production is an arduous, expensive task – possibly involving paying remote help for racking, configuring all the gear, burning in all of the equipment, etc., EC2 uses an entirely virtual setup.  Bringing up 300 new servers (called ‘instances’) is no more difficult or time consuming than deploying 1.  This is accomplished by way of what Amazon calls an AMI, or ‘Amazon Machine Image’.  AMIs are basically special instances of disk images that are copied and booted on demand by the EC2 system.  If you are familiar with VMWare, it is much like the VMDK files used – except it is cloned and booted, rather than run directly (this is what gives you the flexibility to stand up multiple instances all in one go).

Who uses EC2?

What companies and individuals would use EC2?  A number of high profile websites, including the New York Times, Reddit.com, and SmugMug utilize EC2 for a variety of reasons.  Some companies chose to use EC2 for expanding their data-crunching needs (the New York Times does this), while others host their entire site on it (Reddit.com does this).  Another significant user of AWS are individual developers or small teams – the overhead and initial cost to get a server up and running, while retaining full control of it, are extremely minimal – a few hours of work to prep an AMI (or, no time at all to use an AMI from the AMI library!), and a cost of pennies an hour in most cases.

EC2 Limitations

EC2 is not without it’s limitations however – operating system choice is limited, as are some network services (such as email – EC2 is on many RBLs, unfortunately).  Despite being on Amazon’s highly redundant cloud, there are still outages (including some fairly long ones) – nobody is perfect.