EC2

Instance Types

  • Field Programmable Gate Array (F1) - Genomics research, financial analytics, video processing, big data
  • High Speed Storage (I3) - NoSql DB’s, Data warehousing
  • Graphics Intensive (G3) - Video Encoding, 3D Application Streaming
  • High Disk Throughput (H1) - Map Reduce based workloads, distributed file systems
  • Low cost, General Purpose (T3) - Web Servers, small DB’s
  • Dense Storage (D2) - File servers, Data warehousing, hadoop
  • Memory Optimized (R5) - Memory Intensive Apps/DB’s
  • General Purpose (M5) - Application Servers
  • Compute Optimized (C5) - CPU Intensive Apps/DB’s
  • Arm-based (A1) - Scale-out workloads

Pricing

  • On Demand - Fixed rate, no commitment
  • Reserved - Capacity reservation and discount with upfront commitment of 1 or 3 years
  • Spot - Bid for a price you want to pay. If terminated by Amazon you will not be charged for a partial hour of usage.
  • Dedicated - Physical EC2 server dedicated for your use

Placement Groups

  • Clustered - Low latency/High Throughput, single az
  • Spread - Individual Critical, can be multi az
  • Partitioned - Multiple EC2 Iinstnaces, can be multi az
  • Name must be unique for your account
  • Not all types can be in placement groups
  • Cant move an existing instance into a placement group

Facts

  • Termination protection is off by default
  • Instance Store Volumes are ephemeral
  • Retrieve metadata for an instance with curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/
  • Retrieve user data for an instance with curl http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data/
  • When a dedicated host is stopped you can switch it between “dedicated” (single-tenant hardware) and “host” (isolated server), but not back to “default " (shared hardware)

Storage

EBS

Elastic Block Store (for most EC2 workloads).

Types

  • General Purpose SSD (gp2) - Most work loads
  • Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) - Databases
  • Throughput Optimized HDD (s1) - Big Data/Data Warehouses
  • Cold HDD (sc1) - File Servers
  • EBS Magnetic (Standard) - Infrequently accessed data

Facts

  • Root EBS volumes can be encrypted (so can other volumes)
  • EBS Snapshots exist on S3
  • EBS Snapshots are incremental
  • Snapshots should not be taken of a root volume when an instance is running
  • EBS volume sizes can be changed on the fly
  • EBS Volumes will always be in the same AZ as the instance they are attached to
  • By default the root EBS volume is destroyed if an instance is terminated

EFS

Elastic File Store (super scalable NFS).

  • Supports the NFSv4 protocol
  • Does not require pre-provisioing
  • Can scale to petabytes
  • Can support thousands of concurrent connections
  • Provides read after write consistency