EC2
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
What it is: The most famous service in the cloud. These are your Virtual Machines. It is the direct counterpart to GCP's Compute Engine. You choose the OS (Linux/Windows), the CPU/RAM size (Instance Type), and you are responsible for managing it.
Equivalents:
GCP: Compute Engine (GCE)
Azure: Azure Virtual Machines
When you launch an EC2 instance today, 99% of the time, the "Root Volume" (the drive where the OS boots up, like your C: drive) is an EBS Volume.
However, there are three important nuances:
They are separate "organs": Even though they look like one server, the EC2 instance (CPU/RAM) and the EBS Volume (Data) are separate.
Why this matters: If you terminate (delete) the EC2 instance, the EBS volume can survive if you configured it to. You can then attach that same drive to a completely new server.
You pay separately: You are billed for the compute (EC2) per second, and the storage (EBS) per GB-month. Even if you stop the server, you still pay for the EBS volume because the data is still sitting there.
The Alternative (Instance Store): Some high-performance instances come with "Instance Store" (also called Ephemeral Storage). This is an SSD physically attached to the hardware.
Pro: It is insanely fast (no network latency).
Con: If you stop the instance, all data on that drive is erased instantly.
Default: EBS is the default because most people don't want their data to vanish if they reboot or stop their server.
Last updated