Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. Using AWS, you can request Compute power, storage, and other services in minutes and have the flexibility to choose the development platform or programming model.

Below are some of the benefits of using AWS:

Flexible: AWS enables organizations to use the programming models, operating systems, databases, and architectures with which they are already familiar. In addition, this flexibility helps organizations mix and match architectures in order to serve their diverse business needs.

Cost-effective: With AWS, organizations pay only for what they use, without up-front or long-term commitments.

Scalable and Elastic: Organizations can quickly add and subtract AWS resources to their applications in order to meet customer demand and manage costs.

Secure: In order to provide end-to-end security and end-to-end privacy, AWS builds services in accordance with security best practices, provides the appropriate security features in those services, and documents how to use those features.

Experience: When using AWS, organizations can leverage Amazon’s more than fifteen years of experience delivering large-scale, global infrastructure in a reliable, secure fashion.

What Amazon Web Services provide ?

Amazon Web Services provides wide range of APIs in different segments:

1. Compute and Networking
   

   • Amazon EC2
   • Auto Scaling
   • Elastic Load Balancing
   • Amazon Route 53  and many more..

2. Database
   

   • Amazon RDS
   • Amazon DynamoDB
   • Amazon SimpleDB and many more..

3. Analytics
   

   • Amazon EMR
   • Amazon Kinesis
   • AWS Data Pipeline

4. Deployment & Management
   

   • AWS Identity & Access Management
   • AWS CloudTrail
   • Amazon CloudWatch
   • AWS Elastic Beanstalk and many more..

5. Storage & Content Delivery
   

   • Amazon S3
   • Amazon EBS
   • Amazon CloudFront and many more..

6. Application Services
   

   • Amazon AppStream
   • Amazon CloudSearch
   • Amazon SWF and many more..

7. Additional Software & Services
   

   • Alexa Top Sites
   • Alexa Web Information Service
   • Amazon Silk and many more..

With such advance features, you can design an AWS solution that is tailored to your needs.

Which Amazon Service to use for Creating a Virtual Server ?

Amazon provides Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a web service that helps to build and host your software systems. Using Amazon EC2, your investment in hardware up-front gets eliminated, so that you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use this service to launch as many virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or scale down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in usage, reducing your need to forecast traffic.

Features of Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 provides following features:

1. Virtual Computing environments, known as Instances.
2. Pre-configured templates, called AMIs (Amazon machine Images).
3. Various Instance Configurations for CPU, Memory, Storage and Networking capacity of your instances, called Instance Types.
4. Secure Login for your instances using Key pairs.
5. Storage Volumes for temporary data (that’s gets deleted when you stop or terminate the instance), known as Instance Store Volumes.
6. Persistence Storage Volumes, called Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes.
7. Multiple physical locations for your resources, known as Regions and Availability Zones.
8. Firewall setting, that enables you to specify protocols, ports and source IP ranges, to reach your instances, called Security Groups.
9. Static IP addresses for dynamic cloud computing, known as Elastic IP Addresses.
10. Metadata, called Tags, that you can create and assign to your Amazon EC2 resources.
11. Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), virtual networks that you can create and are logically isolated from the rest of the AWS cloud, and that you can optionally connect to your own network.

How to use Amazon EC2 ?

Before getting started with Amazon EC2, you need to Sign Up for an AWS account, you can access the Amazon EC2 console by signing into the AWS Management Console and selecting EC2 from the console home page.

You can use Amazon EC2 from :

1. Amazon EC2 Management Console
2. Amazon EC2 Cloud API
3. Amazon Command Line Interface
   

   • AWS Command Line Interface (CLI)
   • Amazon EC2 Command Line Interface (CLI) Tools
   • AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell

In this blog, I have explained you about the concepts of creating and managing Virtual Servers on Amazon. In my next blog, I will explain you, how to create and manage Virtual Server using different Amazon EC2 Tools. So stay tuned.

If you have questions or need any further assistance, do write us at support@shephertz.com