What Is Amazon EC2? Virtual Servers in the Cloud Explained

Key Takeaways

PC2 is basically a virtual machine, a server you can launch in minutes. You can choose the operating system, the CPU power, the memory, and even attach storage to it. It's like renting a computer from AWS that you control completely. In our photo sharing app, the EC2 instance will run our backend API. This is the part of the app that handles things like uploading photos, processing application logic, and talking to the database. So, whenever someone uses our app, the request eventually reaches our EC2 server, which does the actual work. When launching EC2, you pick two important things. One, the instance type. This decides how powerful your server is. For example, T2 micro for tiny workloads. T3 medium for lightweight apps. M5 large if you need more power. Two, the AMI stands for Amazon machine image. It's like the template for your server. You can choose Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, Windows, or even a custom image you built yourself. Every EC2 instance has a security group. Think of it like a firewall that controls what traffic can come in and go out of your server. For example, we'll configure the EC2 instance to accept traffic only from our load balancer, not directly from the internet. This is why EC2 instances are usually placed in a private subnet.