Amazon EC2 provides the following:
- Instances: Virtual Computing Environments
- Instance Type: Different configurations of memory, storage, CPU, and networking capacity.
- Machine Image: Pre-specified templates for instances that include additional software and operating system.
- Store Volumes: The storage volumes for non-permanent data that is deleted when user hibernate, stop or terminate an instance.
- EBS Volumes: Storage volumes that are persistent for data using the Elastic Block Store (EBS).
- Secure instance log-in using public-key cryptography: AWS saves the public key and users are responsible for storing the private key in a secured place.
The users can use the Amazon EC2 console ‘Create Key Pair' to create one. To get the administrator password for the Windows instance, the user has to specify the name of the key pair that EC2 will use to associate the public key. The key name contains up to 255 ASCII characters and cannot have trailing or leading spaces. And then, under the ‘File Format' section select the format in which the private key will be saved like for deploying with OpenSSH, select ‘pem', and with PuTTY select ‘ppk'. Once the user clicks on ‘Create Key Pair' the private key is automatically downloaded. The base file name will be the name specified as key pair name and file extension determined by the selected format.
Then the user will be able to login using RDP. To launch an instance in more than one region, the user will require to create a key pair for each of the regions. - Security Group: Firewall that allows users to specify the ports, protocols, and source IP ranges that instance can get. A Firewall controls both inbound and outbound HTTP & HTTPS traffic right at the instance level. A user adds rules to a security group to connect to an instance from its IP address with RDP. For each region, a security group must be created, to launch instances.
- The EC2 console automatically detects the IPV4 address. Most non-static IP users provide the IP address range after choosing Region and default VPC, as security-group are very specific to Region. A user provides the name and description to the Security Group. From Inbound Rules from Type List: * Select HTTP and then HTTPS and set the source to Anywhere (0.0.0.0/0) * Select RDP.
In the source box select ‘My IP' to populate the field automatically with the local computer IPV4 address or select ‘Custom' and indicate the IPV4 address of the computer or network using the CIDR notation i.e. insert the suffix/32. - Regions and Availability Zones: Multiple physical locations for resources like the instances and the EBS.
- Elastic IP Address: Static IPV4 address designed for dynamic cloud computing.
- Metadata or Tags: can be created and assigned to Elastic Compute Cloud resources.
- Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs): The virtual networks created that are logically isolated from the other part of the cloud and helps to connect optionally to the user network.