EC2 - EC2 101 Part 1

Question 1

Amazon EC2 is…

Answer 1

…a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud

Question 2

EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to…

Answer 2

…minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change

Question 3

EC2 changes the economies of computing by…

Answer 3

…allowing you to pay only for the capacity that you actually use

Question 4

EC2 provides developers the tools to…

Answer 4

…build failure resilient apps and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios

Question 5

EC2 pricing options

Answer 5

On Demand, Reserved, Spot, Dedicated Hosts

Question 6

On Demand

Answer 6

allow you to pay a fixed rate by the hour with no commitment.

Question 7

On Demand use case example

Answer 7

If you’re a startup, you can pay for instances by the hour with no long term commitment for experimentation, terminate instances when you are complete.

Question 8

Reserved

Answer 8

provide you with a capacity reservation, and offer a significant discount on the hourly charge for an instance. 1-year or 3-year terms

Question 9

Reserved use case example

Answer 9

If you need a minimum of 2 webservers to serve your customers

Question 10

Spot

Answer 10

enable you to bid whatever price you want for instance capacity, providing for even greater savings if your apps have flexible start and end times. engineering, pharma companies use these

Question 11

If bid price > spot price…

Answer 11

…instances can be provisioned

Question 12

If spot price > bid price…

Answer 12

…instances will be terminated

Question 13

Dedicated Hosts

Answer 13

physical EC2 server dedicated for your use (hourly rate). Dedicated hosts can help you reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses

Question 14

On Demand Use Cases

Answer 14

Users that want the low cost and flexibility of EC2 without any up-front payment or long-term commitment

Apps with short term, spiky, or unpredictable workloads that cannot be interrupted

Apps being developed or tested on EC2 for the first time

Question 15

Reserved Use Cases

Answer 15

Apps with steady state or predictable usage

Apps that require reserved capacity

users able to make upfront payments to reduce their total computing costs even further

Question 16

Example of combining reserved + on demand instances

Answer 16

2 webservers = reserved. Need more for Black Friday = on demand

Question 17

Spot Use Cases

Answer 17

Apps that have flexible start and end times

Apps that are only feasible at very low compute prices

Users with urgent computing needs for large amounts of additional capacity

Question 18

Spot Use Case Examples

Answer 18

Large pharma company saves money by using compute capacity during very low demand times

Large world events, e.g. Brexit, analysts need to find solutions really quickly

Question 19

Dedicated Hosts Use Cases

Answer 19

Useful for regulatory requirements that may not support multi-tenant virtualization

Great for licensing which does not support multi-tenancy or cloud deployments (e.g. Microsoft, SQL, Oracle)

Can be purchased on demand (hourly)

can be purchased as a reservation for up to 70% off the on-demand price

Question 20

Termination of Spot Instances - EXAM TIP

Answer 20

If the spot instance is terminated by Amazon EC2, you will not be charged for a partial hour of usage. However, if you terminate the instance yourself, you will be charged for any hour in which the instance ran

Question 21

Instance Types

Answer 21

D = Dense
R = Memory-optimized (RAM)
M = General Purpose (main choice)
C = Compute-optimized
G = Graphics-Intensive
I = High Speed Storage (I/O)
F = Field Programmable Gate Array
T = Lowest Cost, General Purpose (t2 micro)
P = Graphics/General Purpose CPU (pics)
X = Memory-optimized (extreme RAM)

Question 22

Dense Storage use case

Answer 22

Fileservers/Data Warehousing/Hadoop

Question 23

Memory Optimized use case

Answer 23

Memory Intensive apps/DBs

Question 24

General Purpose use case

Answer 24

Application Servers

Question 25

Compute Optimized use case

Answer 25

CPU Intensive apps/DBs

Question 26

Graphics Intensive use case

Answer 26

Video Encoding/3D application streaming

Question 27

Field Programmable Gate Array use case

Answer 27

Hardware acceleration for your code

Question 28

Lowest Cost, General Purpose use case

Answer 28

Web Servers/small DBs

Question 29

Graphics/General Purpose GPU use case

Answer 29

Machine Learning, Bit Coin Mining, etc

Question 30

Memory Optimized use case

Answer 30

SAP HANA, Apache Spark, etc