Misplaced Pages

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: Difference between revisions

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Browse history interactively← Previous editContent deleted Content addedVisualWikitext
Revision as of 17:00, 30 September 2009 edit192.102.82.253 (talk) History← Previous edit Latest revision as of 06:43, 12 December 2024 edit undoCitation bot (talk | contribs)Bots5,406,339 edits Altered template type. Added newspaper. Removed parameters. Some additions/deletions were parameter name changes. | Use this bot. Report bugs. | Suggested by Headbomb | Linked from Misplaced Pages:WikiProject_Academic_Journals/Journals_cited_by_Wikipedia/Sandbox2 | #UCB_webform_linked 20/467 
(863 intermediate revisions by more than 100 users not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
{{Short description|Cloud computing platform}}
{{Expand}}
{{multiple issues|
'''Amazon Elastic ]''' (also known as "EC2") allows customers to rent computers on which to run their own ]s. EC2 allows ] deployment of applications by providing a ] interface through which a customer can create ]s, i.e. server instances, on which the customer can load any software of their choice. A customer can create, launch, and terminate server instances as needed, paying by the hour for active servers, hence the term "elastic". A customer can set up server instances in zones insulated from each other for most failure causes so that one may be a backup for the other and minimize down time.<ref>{{cite web
{{lead too short|date=July 2014}}
{{cleanup reorganize|date=February 2015}}
}}
{{Infobox software
| name = Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
| logo = ]
| logo caption = Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
| screenshot = <!-- ] -->
| caption =
| collapsible =
| author = Amazon
| developer = ]
| released = {{Start date and age|2006|08|25}} (public beta)
| discontinued =
| latest release version =
| latest release date = <!-- {{Start date and age|YYYY|MM|DD|df=yes/no}} -->
| latest preview version =
| programming language =
| operating system = {{Plainlist |
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]<ref name="auto">{{cite web |author1=Jeff Barr |title=New – Use Amazon EC2 Mac Instances to Build & Test macOS, iOS, ipadOS, tvOS, and watchOS Apps |url=https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-use-mac-instances-to-build-test-macos-ios-ipados-tvos-and-watchos-apps/ |website=AWS News Blog |date=30 November 2020 |access-date=1 December 2020 |language=en}}</ref>
}}
| platform =
| size =
| language = English
| genre = ]
| license = ]
| website = {{URL|https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/}}
}}

'''Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud''' ('''EC2''') is a part of ]'s ] platform, ] (AWS), that allows users to rent ]s on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a ] through which a user can boot an ] (AMI) to configure a ], which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate ]-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers{{snd}}hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for ] optimization and high levels of ].<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9904091-7.html |url=http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9904091-7.html
|title=Amazon Web Services adds 'resiliency' to EC2 compute service |title=Amazon Web Services adds 'resiliency' to EC2 compute service
|first=Martin |first=Martin
|last=LaMonica |last=LaMonica
|work=]
|publisher=CNet News
|date=March 27, 2008 |date=March 27, 2008
|accessdate=August 1, 2009 |access-date=August 1, 2009
|archive-date=December 25, 2018
}}</ref>
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181225015935/https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-web-services-adds-resiliency-to-ec2-compute-service/
Amazon.com provides EC2 as one of several web services marketed under the blanket term ] (AWS).
|url-status=dead
}}</ref> In November 2010, Amazon switched its own retail website platform to EC2 and AWS.<ref>
{{Cite AV media|title=AWS Cloud Tour 2011 {{!}} Australia: Event Highlights|URL=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf07L1RUOW4|medium=video}}
</ref>


== History == ==History==
{{see also|Timeline of Amazon Web Services}}
Amazon announced a limited public beta of EC2 on August 25, 2006.<ref>{{cite web
Amazon announced a limited public beta test of EC2 on August 25, 2006,<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/08/amazon_ec2_beta.html |url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/08/amazon_ec2_beta.html
|title=Amazon EC2 Beta |title=Amazon EC2 Beta
Line 19: Line 57:
|date=August 25, 2006 |date=August 25, 2006
|work=Amazon Web Services Blog |work=Amazon Web Services Blog
|access-date= May 31, 2013
|accessdate=August 1, 2009
}}</ref> Access to EC2 was granted on a first come first served basis. }}</ref> offering access on a first-come, first-served basis.
Amazon added two new instance types (Large and Extra-Large) on October 16, 2007.<ref>{{cite web Amazon added two new instance types (Large and Extra-Large) on October 16, 2007.<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2007/10/amazon-ec2-gets.html |url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2007/10/amazon-ec2-gets.html
|title=Amazon EC2 Gets More Muscle |title=Amazon EC2 Gets More Muscle
|first=Jeff
|author=Jinesh|date=October 16, 2007
|last=Barr
|date=October 16, 2007
}}</ref> On May 29, 2008, two more types were added, High-CPU Medium and High-CPU Extra Large.<ref>{{cite web }}</ref> On May 29, 2008, two more types were added, High-CPU Medium and High-CPU Extra Large.<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/05/more-ec2-power.html |url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/05/more-ec2-power.html
Line 32: Line 72:
|date=May 29, 2008 |date=May 29, 2008
|work=Amazon Web Services Blog |work=Amazon Web Services Blog
|accessdate=August 1, 2009 |access-date=August 1, 2009
}}</ref> There are currently five types of instances available. }}</ref> There were twelve types of instances available.<ref>. Aws.amazon.com. Retrieved on 2013-08-09.</ref>


Amazon added three new features on March 27, 2008.<ref>{{cite web Amazon added three new features on March 27, 2008,<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/03/new-ec2-feature.html |url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/03/new-ec2-feature.html
|title=New EC2 Features |title=New EC2 Features
Line 42: Line 82:
|date=March 27, 2008 |date=March 27, 2008
|work=Amazon Web Services Blog |work=Amazon Web Services Blog
|accessdate=August 1, 2009 |access-date=August 1, 2009
}}</ref> static IP addresses, availability zones, and user selectable kernels. On August 20, 2008, Amazon added ] (EBS)<ref name="ebs">{{cite web
}}</ref> These features included Static IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and User Selectable Kernels.
Amazon added Elastic Block Store (EBS) on August 20, 2008.<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/08/amazon-elastic.html |url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/08/amazon-elastic.html
|title=Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Bring Us Your Data |title=Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Bring Us Your Data
|first=Jeff |first=Jeff
|last=Barr |last=Barr
|date=August 20, 2008 |date= August 20, 2008
|access-date= May 31, 2013
|work=Amazon Web Services Blog
|work= Amazon Web Services Blog
|accessdate=August 1, 2009
| archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20110328011236/http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/08/amazon-elastic.html| archive-date= March 28, 2011 |url-status= live}}</ref>
}}</ref> This provides persistent storage, a basic feature which had been lacking since the service was introduced.
This provides persistent storage, a feature that had been lacking since the service was introduced.


Amazon EC2 is in full production since it dropped the beta label on October 23, 2008. On the same day, Amazon announced the following features:<ref name="BigDayForEC2">{{cite web Amazon EC2 went into full production when it dropped the beta label on October 23, 2008. On the same day, Amazon announced the following features:<ref name="BigDayForEC2">{{cite web
|url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/10/big-day-for-ec2.html |url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/10/big-day-for-ec2.html
|title=Big Day For EC2 |title=Big Day For EC2
Line 61: Line 101:
|date=August 23, 2008 |date=August 23, 2008
|work=Amazon Web Services Blog |work=Amazon Web Services Blog
|accessdate=August 1, 2009 |access-date=August 1, 2009
}}</ref> }}</ref>
a Service Level Agreement for EC2, * a service level agreement for EC2,
] in beta form on EC2, * ] in beta form on EC2,
] in beta form on EC2, * ] in beta form on EC2,
plans for an AWS management console, and * plans for an AWS management console, and
plans for load balancing, auto scaling, and cloud monitoring services.<ref name="BigDayForEC2"/> These features were subsequently added on May 18, 2009.<ref>{{cite web * plans for ], ], and cloud monitoring services.<ref name="BigDayForEC2"/>
These features were subsequently added on May 18, 2009.<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/05/new-aws-load-balancing-automatic-scaling-and-cloud-monitoring-services.html |url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/05/new-aws-load-balancing-automatic-scaling-and-cloud-monitoring-services.html
|title=New Features for EC2 |title=New Features for EC2
Line 74: Line 115:
|date=May 18, 2009 |date=May 18, 2009
|work=Amazon Web Services Blog |work=Amazon Web Services Blog
|accessdate=August 1, 2009 |access-date=August 1, 2009
}}</ref> }}</ref>


Amazon EC2 was developed mostly by a team in ] led by Chris Pinkham.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/25/nimbula_cloud_os/
==Virtual machines==
|title=Nimbula puffs up 'cloud operating system'
|website=]
|date=June 25, 2010}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/2010/06/17/amazons-early-efforts-at-cloud-computing-partly-accidental/
|title=Amazon's early efforts at cloud computing? Partly accidental
|date=June 17, 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100621120705/http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud-computing/2010/06/17/amazons-early-efforts-at-cloud-computing-partly-accidental|archive-date=June 21, 2010}}</ref> Pinkham provided the initial architecture guidance for EC2 and then built the team and led the development of the project along with ].


==Instance types==
EC2 uses ] virtualization. Each virtual machine, called an "instance", functions as a ] in one of three sizes; small, large or extra large. Amazon.com sizes instances based on "EC2 Compute Units" — the equivalent CPU capacity of physical hardware. One EC2 Compute Unit equals 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 ] or 2007 ] processor. The system offers the following instance types:
Initially, EC2 used ] virtualization exclusively.<ref>{{cite news |url=http://www.citrix.com/global-partners/amazon-web-services.html |title=Citrix and Amazon Web Services (AWS) |newspaper=citrix.com |access-date=October 23, 2013}}</ref> However, on November 6, 2017, Amazon announced<ref>{{cite web |url=https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-compute-intensive-c5-instances-for-amazon-ec2/ |title=Now Available – Compute-Intensive C5 Instances for Amazon EC2|date=6 November 2017|access-date=November 7, 2017}}</ref> the new C5 family of instances that were based on a custom architecture around the ], called Nitro.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#compute-optimized |title=Amazon EC2 FAQs |access-date=November 7, 2017}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9_4uGvbvnk |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211221/o9_4uGvbvnk |archive-date=2021-12-21 |url-status=live|title=AWS re:Invent 2017: NEW LAUNCH! Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances (CMP330)|website=] |date=30 November 2017 |access-date=December 4, 2017}}{{cbignore}}</ref> Each virtual machine, called an "instance", functions as a ]. Amazon sizes instances based on "Elastic Compute Units". The performance of otherwise identical virtual machines may vary.<ref>J. Dejun, G. Pierre and C.-H. Chi. . In Proceedings of the Workshop on Non-Functional Properties and SLA Management in Service-Oriented Computing, November 2009.</ref> On November 28, 2017, AWS announced a bare-metal instance, a departure from exclusively offering virtualized instance types.<ref>{{cite web| url=https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/28/aws-launches-bare-metal-instances/ |title=AWS launches bare metal instances |first=Frederic |last=Lardinois |date=November 28, 2017 |work=] |access-date=December 4, 2017}}</ref>


As of January 2019, the following instance types were offered:<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/|title=Amazon EC2 Instance Types – Amazon Web Services (AWS)|website=Amazon Web Services, Inc.|language=en-US|access-date=2019-01-28}}</ref>
;Small Instance
* General Purpose: A1, T3, T2, M5, M5a, M4, T3a
:The small instance (default) equates to "a system with 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform"<ref>{{cite web
* Compute Optimized: C5, C5n, C4
|url=http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
* Memory Optimized: R5, R5a, R4, X1e, X1, High Memory, z1d
|title=Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
* Accelerated Computing: P3, P2, G3, F1
|publisher=Amazon.com
* Storage Optimized: H1, I3, D2
|date=July 31, 2009
{{As of |April 2018}}, the following payment methods by instance were offered:<ref>{{cite web |url=http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ |title=Amazon EC2 Pricing |access-date=December 5, 2012 }}</ref>
|accessdate=August 1, 2009
}}</ref>


* On-demand: pay by the hour without commitment.
;Large Instance
* Reserved: rent instances with one-time payment receiving discounts on the hourly charge.
:The large instance represents "a system with 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform".
* Spot: bid-based service: runs the jobs only if the spot price is below the bid specified by bidder. The spot price is claimed to be supply-demand based, however a 2011 study concluded that the price was generally not set to clear the market, but was dominated by an undisclosed ].<ref name="Ben-Yehuda Ben-Yehuda Schuster Tsafrir 2011">{{cite tech report |last=Ben-Yehuda |first=Orna Agmon |last2=Ben-Yehuda |first2=Muli |last3=Schuster |first3=Assaf |last4=Tsafrir |authorlink3=Assaf Schuster |first4=Dan |title=Deconstructing Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing |year=2011 |website=The Taub Faculty of Computer Science, Technion |url=https://www.cs.technion.ac.il/users/wwwb/cgi-bin/tr-info.cgi/2011/CS/CS-2011-09 |access-date=2020-12-27
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220811113049/https://www.cs.technion.ac.il/users/wwwb/cgi-bin/tr-info.cgi/2011/CS/CS-2011-09
|archive-date=2022-08-11
}}</ref><ref name="Wu-et-al">{{cite journal |last1=Wu |first1=Xiaohu |last2=Pellegrini |first2=Francesco De |last3=Gao |first3=Guanyu |last4=Casale |first4=Giuliano |title=A Framework for Allocating Server Time to Spot and On-Demand Services in Cloud Computing |journal=ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems |publisher=Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) |volume=4 |issue=4 |date=2019-12-24 |issn=2376-3639 |doi=10.1145/3366682 |pages=1–31|arxiv=1902.01321 |hdl=10044/1/74507 |s2cid=59599850 |hdl-access=free }}</ref>


===Cost===
;Extra Large Instance
]
:The extra large instance offers the "equivalent of a system with 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform."


{{As of |2018|04}}, Amazon charged about $0.0058 per hour ($4.176 per month) for the smallest "Nano Instance" (t2.nano) virtual machine running Linux or Windows. Storage-optimized instances cost as much as $4.992 per hour (i3.16xlarge). "Reserved" instances can go as low as $2.50 per month for a three-year prepaid plan.{{efn|$109 for a three-year Heavy Utilization Reserved t2.micro Instances reservation amortized over thirty-six months plus one month at $0.002/hour.}}<ref>. Aws.amazon.com (2014-07-01). Retrieved on 2014-07-01.</ref><ref> Simplified and comprehensive EC2 price list updated in real time.</ref> The data transfer charge ranges from free to $0.12 per gigabyte, depending on the direction and monthly volume (inbound data transfer is free on all AWS services<ref>{{cite web
;High-CPU Instance
|url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/06/aws-lowers-its-pricing-again-free-inbound-data-transfer-and-lower-outbound-data-transfer-for-all-ser.html
:Instances of this family have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and address compute-intensive applications.
|title=AWS Lowers its Pricing Again!&nbsp;– No Inbound Data Transfer Fees and Lower Outbound Data Transfer for All Services including Amazon CloudFront
|first=Jeff
|last=Barr
|work=]
|date=June 29, 2011
|access-date=July 6, 2011
| archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20110707085314/http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/06/aws-lowers-its-pricing-again-free-inbound-data-transfer-and-lower-outbound-data-transfer-for-all-ser.html| archive-date= July 7, 2011 | url-status= live}}</ref>).


EC2 costs can be analyzed using the Amazon Cost and Usage Report. There are many different cost categories for EC2 including: hourly Instance Charges, Data Transfer, EBS Volumes, EBS Volume Snapshots, and Nat Gateway.<ref>{{Cite web |title=AWS Cost Analysis: Amazon EC2 Costs {{!}} Strake |url=https://eightlake.com/aws-ec2-cost-analysis |access-date=2024-01-26 |website=eightlake.com |date=January 2024 |language=en}}</ref>
;High-CPU Medium Instance
:Instances of this family have the following configuration:
:*1.7 GB of memory
:*5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
:*350 GB of instance storage
:*32-bit platform
:*I/O Performance: Moderate


===Free tier===
;High-CPU Extra Large Instance
{{As of|2010|December}} Amazon offered<ref>{{cite web | url=https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/10/21/announcing-aws-free-usage-tier/ | title=Announcing AWS Free Usage Tier }}</ref> a bundle of free resource credits to new account holders. The credits are designed to run a "micro" sized server, storage (EBS), and bandwidth for one year.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://aws.amazon.com/free/|title=AWS Free Tier|website=Amazon Web Services, Inc.}}</ref> Unused credits cannot be carried over from one month to the next.<ref>{{Cite web|title = FAQs|url = http://aws.amazon.com/free/faqs/|website = Amazon Web Services, Inc.|access-date = 2015-07-31}}</ref>
:Instances of this family have the following configuration:
:*7 GB of memory
:*20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
:*1690 GB of instance storage
:*64-bit platform
:*I/O Performance: High

== Pricing ==


===Reserved instances===
Amazon primarily charges customers in two ways:
Reserved instances enable EC2 or RDS service users to reserve an instance for one or three years. The corresponding hourly rate charged by Amazon to operate the instance is 35 to 75% lower than the rate charged for on-demand instances.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/12/reserved-instance-options-for-amazon-ec2.html|title=Additional Reserved Instance Options for Amazon EC2|date=December 2011|publisher=Amazon}}</ref>
*Hourly charge per virtual machine
Reserved instances can be purchased with three different payment options: All Upfront, Partial Upfront and No Upfront. The different purchase options allow for different structuring of payment models, with a larger discount given to customers that pay their reservation upfront.<ref>{{Cite web |title=A Complete Guide to AWS Reservations {{!}} Strake |url=https://getstrake.com/blog/a-complete-guide-to-aws-reservations |access-date=2023-02-28 |website=getstrake.com |language=en}}</ref>
*Data transfer charge


Reserved Instances are purchased based on a resource commitment. These reservations are made based on an instance type and a count of that instance type. For example, you could reserve 100 i3.large instances for a 3-year term.
However there is additional charges for:
*Allocated and unused ]
*Storage using ] (EBS)
*Additional transfer charges using ]
*Using ] service to monitor your virtual machine
*Using ] which distributes load among selected virtual machine
*Note: You could also be charged for other ] used in conjunction with EC2, for example S3 charges for hosting a custom AMI


In September 2016, AWS announced several enhancements to Reserved instances, introducing a new feature called scope and a new reservation type called a Convertible.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/blog/quick-start-guide-aws-regional-convertible-reservations |title=A Quick Start Guide To AWS Regional & Convertible Reservations |publisher=] |first=Alan |last=Santos |date=September 29, 2016 |access-date=2016-10-04 |archive-date=2016-10-05 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161005121845/https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/blog/quick-start-guide-aws-regional-convertible-reservations |url-status=dead }}</ref> In October 2017, AWS announced the allowance to subdivide the instances purchased for more flexibility.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.pcworld.com/article/3180821/cloud-computing/aws-follows-google-with-reserved-instance-flexibility-changes.html |title=AWS Follows Google With Reserved Instance Flexibility Changes |first=Blair |last=Hanley Frank |work=] |date=March 14, 2017 |access-date=2018-03-04}}</ref>
The hourly virtual machine rate is fixed, based on the capacity and features of the virtual machine. Amazon advertising describes the pricing scheme as "you pay for resources you consume," but defines resources such that an idle virtual machine is consuming resources, as opposed to other pricing schemes where one would pay for basic resources such as CPU time.


===Spot instances===
Customers can easily create/reboot virtual machines. Shutdown is not available but you can terminate your instance and create another one later, although in this case you will lose data. Unless backed up on ], or on their ] service ].
Cloud providers maintain large amounts of excess capacity they have to sell or risk incurring losses.<ref name="ladypine">{{Cite web |url=https://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~ladypine/spotprice-ieee.pdf|title=Deconstructing Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing|last=Technion - Israel Institute of Technology|publisher=Technion University |access-date=2018-03-04}}</ref>
Amazon EC2 Spot instances are spare compute capacity in the AWS cloud available at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices.<ref name="Wu-et-al"/> As a trade-off, AWS offers no ] on these instances and customers take the risk that it can be interrupted with only two minutes of notification when Amazon needs the capacity back. Researchers from the ] found that "they (Spot instances) are typically generated at random from within a tight price interval via a dynamic hidden reserve price".<ref name="ladypine" /> Some companies, like Spotinst, are using machine learning to predict spot interruptions up to 15 minutes in advance.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://thenewstack.io/spotinst-making-cheaper-excess-compute-capacity/ |title=Spotinst: Making the Most of Cheaper Excess Compute Capacity |first=Susan |last=Hall |date=December 26, 2017 |work=The News Stack |access-date=2018-03-04}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/25/spotnist-delivers-spot-cloud-infrastructure-services-at-discount-prices/|title=Spotinst delivers spot cloud infrastructure services at discount prices|last=Miller |first=Ron |date=October 25, 2017 |work=] |access-date=2018-03-04}}</ref>


=== Savings Plans ===
As of March 2009, Amazon's time charge is about $73/month for the smallest "On-Demand" virtual machine without Windows and twelve times that for the largest one running Windows. "Reserved" instances can go as low as $31/month for a three-year prepaid plan.<ref>http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing</ref> The data transfer charge ranges from $0.10 to $0.17 per gigabyte, depending on the direction and monthly volume.
In November 2019, Amazon announced Savings Plans.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/|title=Savings Plans – Amazon Web Services|website=Amazon Web Services, Inc.}}</ref> Savings Plans are an alternative to Reserved Instances<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.gorillastack.com/news/aws-savings-plans-reserved-instances/|title=Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances|date=7 November 2019}}</ref> that come in two different plan types: Compute Savings Plans and EC2 Instances Savings Plans. Compute Savings Plans allow an organization to commit to EC2 and Fargate usage with the freedom to change region, family, size, availability zone, OS and tenancy inside the lifespan of the commitment. EC2 Instance Savings plans provide a larger discount than Compute Savings Plans but are less flexible meaning a user must commit to individual instance families within a region to take advantage, but with the freedom to change instances within the family in that region.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/faq/|title=Savings Plans FAQ &#124; Amazon Web Services|website=Amazon Web Services, Inc.}}</ref>


AWS uses the Cost Explorer to automatically calculate recommendations for the commitments you should make how that commitment will look like as a monthly charge on your AWS bill.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://cast.ai/blog/running-on-aws-savings-plans-you-can-still-reduce-your-cloud-bill/ |title=Running on AWS Savings Plans? You can still reduce your cloud bill |first=Peter |last=Santis |work=CAST AI|date=July 14, 2021 |access-date=2021-09-13}}</ref> AWS Savings Plans are purchased based on hourly spend commitment. This hourly commitment is made using the discounted pricing of the savings plan you are purchasing. For example, you could commit to spending $5 per hour, on a Compute Savings Plan, for a 3-year term.<ref>{{Cite web |title=A Complete Guide to AWS Reservations {{!}} Strake |url=https://getstrake.com/blog/a-complete-guide-to-aws-reservations |access-date=2023-02-28 |website=getstrake.com |language=en}}</ref>
Amazon does not have monthly minimums or account maintenance charges.


==Features==
==Operating systems==


===Operating systems===
When it launched in August 2006, the EC2 service offered ] and later ]' ] and ]. In October 2008, EC2 added the ] operating system to the list of available ]s.<ref>{{cite web
{{Further|operating system}}
When it launched in August 2006, the EC2 service offered ] and later ]' ] and ]. In October 2008, EC2 added the ] and ] operating systems to the list of available ]s.<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10073696-2.html |url=http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10073696-2.html
|title=Amazon's Linux cloud computing out of beta, joined by Windows |title=Amazon's Linux cloud computing out of beta, joined by Windows
|first=Stephen |first=Stephen
|last=Shankland |last=Shankland
|work=]
|publisher=CNet News
|date=October 23, 2008 |date=October 23, 2008
|accessdate=October 24, 2008 |access-date=October 24, 2008
}}</ref><ref>{{cite web }}</ref><ref>{{cite web
|url=http://aws.amazon.com/windows/ |url=http://aws.amazon.com/windows/
|title=Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Running Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server |title=Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Running Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server
|publisher=Amazon.com
|date=October 23, 2008 |date=October 23, 2008
|accessdate=October 25, 2008 |access-date=October 25, 2008
| archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20081201023846/http://aws.amazon.com/windows/| archive-date= 1 December 2008 | url-status= live}}</ref>
In March 2011, ] AMIs became available.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_now_runs_under_amazon |title=NetBSD now runs under Amazon EC2 |first=Jean-Yves |last=Migeon |work=NetBSD Blog |date=March 13, 2011 |access-date=August 9, 2013}}</ref> In November 2012, ] support was added.<ref>{{cite web
|url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/windows-server-2012-now-available-on-aws.html
|title=Windows Server 2012 Now Available on AWS
|date=November 19, 2012
|access-date=March 26, 2014
}}</ref> }}</ref>


Since 2006, ], a FreeBSD developer and Security Officer, solicited Amazon to add FreeBSD.<ref name="YT interview">{{cite web|last1=Barr|first1=Jeff|title=Interview - Live from AWS re:Invent Colin Percival, FreeBSD Developer|date=28 November 2012 |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK7EeV_GD3M |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211221/SK7EeV_GD3M |archive-date=2021-12-21 |url-status=live|publisher=Amazon Web Services 28.11.2012|access-date=25 May 2015}}{{cbignore}}</ref> In November 2012, Amazon officially supported running ] in EC2.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/aws-marketplace-additional-operating-system-support.html|title=AWS Marketplace – Additional EC2 Operating System Support (FreeBSD, Debian, CentOS)|date=23 November 2012|publisher=Amazon}}</ref><ref name=CP-FreeBSDonEC2HowTo>{{cite web|last1=Percival|first1=Colin|title=How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images|url=http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-02-16-FreeBSD-EC2-build.html|publisher=Colin Percival|access-date=25 May 2015}}</ref><ref name=CP-FreeBSD-EC2>{{cite web|last1=Percival|first1=Colin|title=FreeBSD on EC2|url=http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/|publisher=Colin Percival|access-date=25 May 2015}}</ref> The FreeBSD/EC2 platform is maintained by Percival<ref name=AWS-ColinPercival>{{cite web|title=Colin Percival|url=https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=4a931b8a-95f6-4bb2-8b7e-53507851c459|website=awsmarketplace|publisher=Amazon Web Services, Inc.|access-date=25 May 2015}}</ref> who also developed the secure ] ]-cloud based backup service ].<ref name=TarsnapCP>{{cite web|last1=Percival|first1=Colin|title=About Tarsnap|url=http://www.tarsnap.com/about.html|publisher=Tarsnap and C. Percival|access-date=25 May 2015}}</ref>
Plans are in place for the ] interface for the Amazon ] to be packaged into the standard ] distribution.


Amazon has their own Linux distribution based on ] and ] as a low cost offering known as the ]. Version 2013.03 included: ], Java ] Runtime Environment and ].<ref>{{cite web |title= Amazon Linux AMI 2013.03 Release Notes |work= AWS web site |url= http://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/2013.03-release-notes/ |access-date= May 31, 2013 }}</ref>
==Persistent Storage==


On November 30, 2020, Amazon announced that it would be adding macOS to the EC2 service. Initial support was announced for ] and ] running on ].<ref name="auto"/>
Amazon.com provides persistent storage in the form of Elastic Block Storage (EBS). Users can set up and manage volumes of sizes from 1GB to 1TB. The servers can attach these instances of EBS to one server at a time in order to maintain data storage by the servers. Storage requirements can also be met by Amazon's ].


=== Managed Container and Kubernetes Services ===
==Automated Scaling==


Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a Docker registry service for Amazon EC2 instances to access repositories and images.<ref name="container_roadmap">{{cite web | last=Krazit | first=Tom | title=Amazon Web Services reveals a public road map for its cloud container services | website=GeekWire | date=2018-12-11 | url=https://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-web-services-reveals-public-road-map-cloud-container-services/ | access-date=2023-12-24}}</ref>
Amazon's Auto Scaling feature of ] allow you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity, both up and down.
If traffic to your site spikes, Amazon Auto Scaling can automatically add more capacity to maintain performance.
However, if your site traffic is low, Amazon Auto Scaling can ensure you don't have too much capacity, wasting money and resources.
Amazon's Auto Scaling is well suited for sites that experience unpredictable traffic. Even if your site has consistent usage, Auto Scaling can help prevent down time from heavy traffic, due to being in the news.
You can control costs by setting the minimum and maximum number of servers to run.


Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) a managed Kubernetes service running on top of EC2 without needing to provision or manage instances.<ref name="container_roadmap"/>
;Features of Auto Scaling
*Auto Scaling enables you to set conditions for when you want to scale up or down your Amazon EC2 usage. When one of the conditions is met, Auto Scaling automatically applies the action you’ve defined.
*Auto Scaling enables your application to scale up Amazon EC2 instances seamlessly and automatically when demand spikes.
*Auto Scaling allows you to automatically shed unneeded Amazon EC2 instances and save money when demand subsides.
*Auto Scaling is free to Amazon CloudWatch customers.
*If you’re signed up for the Amazon EC2 service, you’re already registered to use Auto Scaling and can begin using the feature via the Auto Scaling APIs or Command Line Tools.
*Auto Scaling is available in the US Region and will be available in the EU Region soon.


===Persistent storage===
==Elastic IP Addresses==
An EC2 instance may be launched with a choice of two types of storage for its boot disk or "root device." The first option is a local "instance-store" disk as a root device (originally the only choice). The second option is to use an EBS volume as a root device. Instance-store volumes are temporary storage, which survive rebooting an EC2 instance, but when the instance is stopped or terminated (e.g., by an API call, or due to a failure), this store is lost.
Amazon's Elastic IP Address feature is similar to static IP address in traditional data centers, with one key difference. A user can programmatically map an Elastic IP Address to any virtual machine instance without a network administrator's help and without having to wait for DNS to propagate the new binding. In this sense an Elastic IP Address belongs to the account and not to a virtual machine instance. It exists until it is explicitly removed. If you want to mask instance and Availability Zone failures from your users then you would want to buy an Elastic IP Address and automatically manage its mapping to instances.


The ] (EBS) provides raw ] that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances. These block devices can then be used like any raw block device. In a typical use case, this would include formatting the device with a ] and ] it. In addition, EBS supports a number of advanced storage features, including snapshotting and cloning. EBS volumes can be up to 16&nbsp;TB in size. EBS volumes are built on replicated storage, so that the failure of a single component will not cause data loss.
==Amazon CloudWatch==
EBS was introduced to the general public by Amazon in August 2008.<ref name="ebs" />


]
Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides real-time monitoring to Amazon's EC2 customers on their resource utilization such as CPU,disk, network and memory. The data is aggreagated and provided through AWS management console. It can also be accessed through command line tools and web API's if the customer desires to monitor their EC2 resoucres through their enterprise monitoring software.


EBS volumes provide persistent storage independent of the lifetime of the EC2 instance, and act much like hard drives on a real server. More accurately, they appear as block devices to the operating system that are backed by Amazon's disk arrays. The OS is free to use the device however it wants. In the most common case, a file system is loaded and the volume acts as a hard drive. Another possible use is the creation of RAID arrays by combining two or more EBS volumes. RAID allows increases of speed and/or reliability of EBS. Users can set up and manage storage volumes of sizes from 1&nbsp;GB to 16&nbsp;TB. The volumes support snapshots, which can be taken from a GUI tool or the API. EBS volumes can be attached or detached from instances while they are running, and moved from one instance to another.<ref>{{cite web
The metrics collected by Amazon CloudWatch enables Auto Scaling feature to dynamically add or remove EC2 instances. The customers are charged by the number of monitoring instances.
|url = http://1201restart.com/Articles/Introduction_to_EBS_Volumes
|title = Introduction to EBS Volumes
|publisher = 1201 Restart.com
|date = December 2010
|access-date = December 18, 2010
|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110513114653/http://1201restart.com/Articles/Introduction_to_EBS_Volumes
|archive-date = 2011-05-13
|url-status = dead
}}</ref>


] is a storage system in which data is accessible to EC2 instances, or directly over the network to suitably authenticated callers (all communication is over HTTP). Amazon does not charge for the bandwidth for communications between EC2 instances and S3 storage "in the same region." Accessing S3 data stored in a different region (for example, data stored in Europe from a US East Coast EC2 instance) will be billed at Amazon's normal rates.
==Reserved Instances==
{{EmptySection|date=August 2009}}


S3-based storage is priced per gigabyte per month. Applications access S3 through an API. For example, ] supports a special s3: filesystem to support reading from and writing to S3 storage during a ] job. There are also S3 filesystems for Linux, which mount a remote S3 filestore on an EC2 image, as if it were local storage. As S3 is not a full ] filesystem, things may not behave the same as on a local disk (e.g., no locking support).
==Abuse==


===Elastic IP addresses===
In early July 2008 ] and ] started to block Amazon's EC2 address-pool due to problems with the distribution of ] and ].<ref>{{cite web
]

Amazon's elastic IP address feature is similar to static IP address in traditional data centers, with one key difference. A user can programmatically map an elastic IP address to any virtual machine instance without a network administrator's help and without having to wait for DNS to propagate the binding. In this sense an Elastic IP Address belongs to the account and not to a virtual machine instance. It exists until it is explicitly removed, and remains associated with the account even while it is associated with no instance.<ref>{{Cite web | url=https://riyanchristy.goseeq.net/what-is-an-elastic-ip/ | title=What is an Elastic IP | date=June 2, 2022 | access-date=June 16, 2022 | archive-date=August 12, 2022 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220812181835/https://riyanchristy.goseeq.net/what-is-an-elastic-ip/ | url-status=dead }}</ref>

===Amazon CloudWatch===<!-- CloudWatch, Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudWatch redirect to this section -->
]

Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides real-time monitoring to Amazon's EC2 customers on their resource utilization such as CPU, disk, network and replica lag for RDS Database replicas.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_ReadRepl.html|title=Working with Read Replicas of MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL DB Instances - Amazon Relational Database Service|website=docs.aws.amazon.com}}</ref> CloudWatch does not provide any memory, disk space, or load average metrics without running additional software on the instance. Since December 2017 Amazon provides a CloudWatch Agent for Windows and Linux operating systems included disk and previously not available memory information,<ref>{{Cite web|title=Amazon CloudWatch introduces a new CloudWatch Agent with AWS Systems Manager Integration for Unified Metrics and Logs Collection|date=14 December 2017|access-date=2 March 2020|website=aws.amazon.com|url=https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/12/amazon-cloudwatch-introduces-a-new-cloudwatch-agent-with-aws-systems-manager-integration-for-unified-metrics-and-logs-collection/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200302133706/https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/12/amazon-cloudwatch-introduces-a-new-cloudwatch-agent-with-aws-systems-manager-integration-for-unified-metrics-and-logs-collection/|url-status=dead|archive-date=2 March 2020}}</ref> previously Amazon provided example scripts for Linux instances to collect OS information.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/mon-scripts.html|title=Monitoring Memory and Disk Metrics for Amazon EC2 Linux Instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud|website=docs.aws.amazon.com}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://forums.aws.amazon.com/profile.jspa?userID=202407|title=AWS Developer Forums: User Profile for Henry@AWS|website=forums.aws.amazon.com}}</ref> The data is aggregated and provided through AWS management console. It can also be accessed through command line tools and Web APIs,<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.gorillastack.com/news/cloudtrail-vs-cloudwatch/|title=GorillaStack CloudWatch vs CloudTrail|date=2019-09-17|website=GorillaStack}}</ref> if the customer desires to monitor their EC2 resources through their enterprise monitoring software. Amazon provides an API which allows clients to operate on CloudWatch alarms.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/APIReference/Welcome.html|title=Welcome - Amazon CloudWatch|website=docs.aws.amazon.com}}</ref>

The metrics collected by Amazon CloudWatch enables the ] feature to dynamically add or remove EC2 instances.{{sfnp|AWS in Action|Wittig|2016|pages= 372–375 }} The customers are charged by the number of monitoring instances.

Since May 2011, Amazon CloudWatch accepts custom metrics<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://aws.amazon.com/releasenotes/item/|title=AWS Release Notes|website=Amazon Web Services, Inc.}}</ref> that can be submitted programmatically via Web Services API and then monitored the same way as all other internal metrics, including setting up the alarms for them, and since July 2014 Cloudwatch Logs service is also available.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2014/07/10/introducing-amazon-cloudwatch-logs/|title=Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Logs|website=Amazon Web Services, Inc.}}</ref>

Basic Amazon CloudWatch is included in Amazon Free Tier service.

===Automated scaling===
]
{{Further|autoscaling}}

Amazon's auto-scaling feature of EC2 allows it to automatically adapt computing capacity to site traffic.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/|title=AWS Auto Scaling|website=Amazon Web Services, Inc.|language=en-US|access-date=2019-09-26}}</ref> The schedule-based (e.g. time-of-the-day) and rule-based (e.g. CPU utilization thresholds) auto scaling mechanisms are easy to use and efficient for simple applications. However, one potential problem is that VMs may take up to several minutes to be ready to use, which are not suitable for time critical applications. The VM startup time is dependent on image size, VM type, data center locations, etc.<ref name="vmstartuptime2012">{{cite book|last=Mao|first=Ming|author2=M. Humphrey|title=2012 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Cloud Computing |chapter=A Performance Study on the VM Startup Time in the Cloud |s2cid=1285357|year=2012|doi=10.1109/CLOUD.2012.103|isbn=978-1-4673-2892-0|page=423}}</ref> The convenience of using EC2 enables you to dynamically increase capacity in accordance with demand and access resources rapidly.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.yolra.com/blog/15-aws-services|title=Top 15 AWS Services for 2023|date=17 September 2022|access-date=23 October 2022|archive-date=23 October 2022|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221023205100/https://www.yolra.com/blog/15-aws-services|url-status=dead}}</ref>

<!--===Lack of IPv6-support===
Despite an announcement in 2011,<ref>{{cite web|url=https://aws.amazon.com/de/blogs/aws/elastic-load-balancing-ipv6-zone-apex-support-additional-security/|title=Elastic Load Balancing – IPv6, Zone Apex Support, Additional Security|publisher=Amazon}}</ref> EC2 doesn't yet support IPv6.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=613158|title=AWS Developer Forums: When will IPv6 be available for ...|website=forums.aws.amazon.com}}</ref>
-->
== Pricing ==
NOTE: the examples, figures and comparison charts in this section are from 2018 in the best case; please bear this in mind, as the situation has changed a lot from then.

]
]
]

On Demand EC2 instances are priced per hour. An example of this pricing would be $0.096 per hour for a Linux, m5.large, EC2 instance in the us-east-1 region. Pricing will vary based on the instance type, region, and operating system of the instance. Public on-demand pricing for EC2 can be found on the .

The other pricing models for EC2 have different pricing models.

Spot instances also have a cost per instance hour, but the cost will change on a regular basis based on the supply of EC2 spot capacity.

Reserved Instances and Compute Savings plans are priced per hour. Each of these reservation tools has its own price per hour based on the payment option, term and reservation product being used. These prices are locked in for either a 1-year or 3-year term.

Amazon EC2 price varies from $2.5 per month for "nano" instance with 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB RAM on board to "xlarge" type of instances with 32 vCPU and 488 GB RAM billed up to $3997.19 per month.

The charts above show how Amazon EC2 pricing is compared to similar Cloud Computing services: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kamatera, and Vultr.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://5best.cloud/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-cloud/|title=Amazon AWS vs Microsoft Azure vs Google Cloud vs Kamatera vs Vultr - 5 Best Cloud Services|date=2017-12-02|work=5 Best Cloud Services|access-date=2017-12-24|language=en-US}}</ref>

{| class="wikitable mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"
|+Amazon EC2 compared to similar cloud computing services
|
|Amazon EC2
|Microsoft Azure
|Google Cloud Platform
|Kamatera
|Vultr
|-
|1vCPU 0.5&nbsp;GB RAM
|$3.29
|
|
|
| $2.5
|-
|1vCPU 0.75&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|$14.88
|
|
|
|-
|1vCPU 1&nbsp;GB RAM
| $6.83
|
|
| $11
| $5
|-
|1vCPU 1.75&nbsp;GB RAM
|
| $44.64
|
|
|
|-
|1vCPU 2&nbsp;GB RAM
| $13.14
|
|
| $17
| $10
|-
|1vCPU 3.75&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
| $24.27
|
|
|-
|2vCPU 3.5&nbsp;GB RAM
|
| $89.88
|
|
|
|-
|2vCPU 4&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|
| $41
| $20
|-
|2vCPU 7.5&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
| $48.55
|
|
|-
|2vCPU 8&nbsp;GB RAM
| $52.56
|
|
| $61
|
|-
|4vCPU 7&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|$178.56
|
|
|
|-
|4vCPU 8&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|
|$86
|$40
|-
|4vCPU 15&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|$97.09
|
|
|-
|4vCPU 15&nbsp;GB RAM
|$134
|
|
|$134
|
|-
|6vCPU 16&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|
|$159
|$80
|-
|8vCPU 14&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|$357.12
|
|
|
|-
|8vCPU 16&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|
|$184
|
|-
|8vCPU 30&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|$194.18
|
|
|-
|8vCPU 32&nbsp;GB RAM
|$219.64
|
|
|$280
|$160
|-
|8vCPU 49&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|
|$328
|
|-
|8vCPU 56&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|$744
|
|
|
|-
|16vCPU 32&nbsp;GB RAM
|$412.53
|
|
|
|
|-
|8vCPU 65&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|
|$408
|
|-
|12vCPU 65&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|
|$626
|
|-
|16vCPU 32&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|$388.36
|$746
|
|-
|16vCPU 65&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|
|
|$320
|-
|20vCPU 65&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|
|
|$826
|-
|12vCPU 112&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|$1339.20
|
|
|
|-
|16vCPU 112&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|$1450.80
|
|
|
|-
|20vCPU 98&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|
|
|$986
|-
|36vCPU 60&nbsp;GB RAM
|$825.06
|
|
|
|
|-
|20vCPU 131&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|
|
|$1146
|-
|32vCPU 120&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|$776.72
|
|
|-
|16vCPU 224&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|$1935.1
|
|
|
|-
|20vCPU 196&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|
|
|$1466
|-
|20vCPU 262&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|
|
|$1786
|-
|24vCPU 224&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|$2678.40
|
|
|
|-
|64vCPU 240&nbsp;GB RAM
|
|
|$1553.44
|
|
|-
|32vCPU 488&nbsp;GB RAM
|$3997.19
|
|
|
|
|}

==Reliability==
]
To make EC2 more ], Amazon engineered ''Availability Zones'' that are designed to be insulated from failures in other availability zones. Availability zones do not share the same infrastructure. Applications running in more than one availability zone can achieve higher availability.<ref name="AWS in Action, Availability Zones" />

EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy. For example, to minimize downtime, a user can set up server instances in multiple zones that are insulated from each other for most causes of failure such that one backs up the other.

Higher-availability database services, like ] run separately from EC2 instances.

==Issues==
In early July 2008, the anti-spam organizations ] and ] began blocking Amazon's EC2 address pool due to problems with the distribution of ] and ].<ref>{{cite news
|url=http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/07/amazon_hey_spammers_get_off_my.html |url=http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/07/amazon_hey_spammers_get_off_my.html
|title=Amazon: Hey Spammers, Get Off My Cloud! |title=Amazon: Hey Spammers, Get Off My Cloud!
|first=Brian |first=Brian
|last=Krebs |last=Krebs
|author-link=Brian Krebs
|publisher=]
|work=Security Fix
|publisher=]
|date=July 1, 2008 |date=July 1, 2008
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131203081807/http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/07/amazon_hey_spammers_get_off_my.html
|accessdate=August 1, 2009
|archive-date=December 3, 2013
}}
</ref> }}</ref>


On December 1, 2010, Amazon pulled its service to ] after coming under political pressure in the US.<ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon | location=London | work=The Guardian | first=Ewen | last=MacAskill | title=WikiLeaks website pulled by Amazon after US political pressure | date=December 2, 2010}}</ref> Assange said that WikiLeaks chose Amazon knowing it would probably be kicked off the service "in order to separate rhetoric from reality".<ref>{{Cite web |title=WikiLeaks got kicked off Amazon on purpose, says Assange |url=https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/wikileaks-got-kicked-off-amazon-on-purpose-says-assange/ |access-date=2023-10-23 |website=CNET |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |date=2010-12-03 |title=Julian Assange answers your questions |language=en-GB |work=The Guardian |url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/blog/2010/dec/03/julian-assange-wikileaks |access-date=2023-10-23 |issn=0261-3077}}</ref> The Internet group ] attempted to attack EC2 in revenge; however, Amazon was not affected by the attack.<ref>{{cite news |first1=Matthew |last1=Weaver |first2=Mark |last2=Tran |title=WikiLeaks cables: Shell, Operation Payback and Assange for the Nobel prize{{snd}}as it happened |url= https://www.theguardian.com/news/blog/2010/dec/09/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-updates |work=] |date= December 9, 2010 |access-date= May 31, 2013 }}</ref>
==References==
{{Reflist}}


Amazon's websites were temporarily offline on December 12, 2010, although it was initially unclear if this was due to attacks or a hardware failure. An Amazon official later stated that it was due to a hardware failure.<ref>{{cite news |first=Charles |last=Arthur |title=Amazon says outage in Europe due to hardware failure, not hacking attack |url= https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/dec/13/amazon-failure-not-hacking-wikileaks |work=] |date= December 13, 2010 |access-date= May 31, 2013 }}</ref>
==See also==


{{wikinews|Amazon server outage affects Reddit, other websites}}
Shortly before 5&nbsp;am ET on April 21, 2011, an outage started at EC2's ] data center that brought down several websites, including ], ], ], ], and ].<ref>{{cite news| url=https://money.cnn.com/2011/04/21/technology/amazon_server_outage/index.htm | work=] | first=Julianne | last=Pepitone | title=Amazon EC2 outage downs Reddit, Quora | date=April 21, 2011}}</ref><ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/technology/23cloud.html | work=] | first=Steve | last=Lohr | title=Amazon Malfunction Raises Doubts About Cloud Computing | date=April 22, 2011}}</ref><ref>{{cite news | url=http://www.doeswhat.com/2011/04/21/cloud-storm-amazons-ec2-takes-down-startups/ | work=DoesWhat | title=Cloud storm, EC2 startup takedown | date=April 21, 2011 | access-date=June 4, 2011 | archive-date=May 24, 2011 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110524165205/http://www.doeswhat.com/2011/04/21/cloud-storm-amazons-ec2-takes-down-startups/ | url-status=dead }}</ref> Specifically, attempts to use Amazon's elastic-disk and database services hung, failed, or were slow. Service was restored to some parts of the data center (three of four "availability zones" in Amazon's terms) by late afternoon Eastern time that day;<ref>{{cite web|url=http://status.aws.amazon.com/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080420185258/http://status.aws.amazon.com/|url-status=live|archive-date=2008-04-20|title=6:18&nbsp;pm PDT April 21, 2011, entry, says "all Availability Zones except one have been functioning normally for the past 5 hours."|website=amazon.com}}</ref> problems for at least some customers were continuing as of April 25.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://status.aws.amazon.com/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080420185258/http://status.aws.amazon.com/|url-status=live|archive-date=2008-04-20|title=April 25 entry.|website=amazon.com}}</ref> 0.07% of EBS volumes in one zone have also been lost; EBS failures were a part of normal operation even before this outage and were a risk documented by Amazon,<ref> section "Volume Durability"</ref> though the number of failures and the number of ''simultaneous'' failures may find some EC2 users unprepared.

On Sunday August 6, 2011, Amazon suffered a power outage in one of their Ireland availability zones.<ref>{{cite news | first=Jack | last=Clark | url=http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/cloud/2011/08/08/lightning-strikes-amazons-european-cloud-40093641/ | title=Lightning strikes Amazon's European cloud | work=] | date=August 8, 2011}}</ref> Lightning was originally blamed for the outage; however, on August 11, Irish energy supplier ESB Networks dismissed this as a cause, but at time of writing, could not confirm what the cause of the problem was.<ref>{{cite news | first=Paul | last=Kunert | url=https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/11/esb_web_outage/ | title=Amazon web outage not caused by lightning | work=] | date=August 11, 2011}}</ref> The power outage raised multiple questions regarding Amazon's EBS infrastructure, which caused several bugs in their software to be exposed. The bugs resulted in some customers' data being deleted when recovering EBS volumes in a mid-write operation during the crash.<ref>{{cite news | first=Jack | last=Clark | url=http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/cloud/2011/08/10/aws-cloud-accidentally-deletes-customer-data-40093665/ | title=AWS cloud accidentally deletes customer data | work=] | date=August 10, 2011}}</ref>

August 8, 2011, saw another network connectivity outage of Amazon's Northern Virginia data center, knocking out the likes of Reddit, Quora, Netflix and FourSquare.<ref>{{cite news | first=Steven | last=Musil | url=http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20089866-93/amazon-cloud-outage-downs-netflix-quora/ | title=Amazon cloud outage downs Netflix, Quora | work= ] | date=August 9, 2011}}</ref> The outage lasted around 25 minutes.

Another Northern Virginia data center outage occurred on October 22, 2012, from approximately 10&nbsp;am to 4&nbsp;pm PT. Edmodo, Airbnb, Flipboard, Reddit, and other customers were affected. Anonymous claimed responsibility, but Amazon denied this assertion.<ref>{{cite news |last=Tibken |first=Shara | url=http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57537499-93/amazon-cloud-outage-impacts-reddit-airbnb-flipboard/ | title=Amazon cloud outage impacts Reddit, Airbnb, Flipboard | date=October 22, 2012 |work=]}}</ref>

==See also==
{{Div col|colwidth=22em}}
* ] * ]
* ] * ]
* ] * ]
* ]
* ]
* ] * ]
* ]
* ] * ]
* ]
* ] * ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
* ] * ]
* ] * ]
* ]
* ]
* ]
{{div col end}}

==Notes==
{{notelist}}

==References==
{{Reflist|30em|refs=

<ref name="AWS in Action, Availability Zones" >{{Cite book
|title=Amazon Web Services in Action
|last1=Wittig |first1=Andreas
|last2=Wittig |first2=Michael
|year=2016
|publisher=Manning Press
|isbn=978-1-61729-288-0
|ref={{harvid|AWS in Action|Wittig|2016}}
|pages=290–294
}}</ref>

}}

== External links ==
<!-- Per ], choose one official website only -->
* {{official website|https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/}}


==External links==
* main page
{{Amazon}} {{Amazon}}
{{Cloud computing}} {{Cloud computing}}

]
]
]
]
] ]
] ]
] ]

]
]

Latest revision as of 06:43, 12 December 2024

Cloud computing platform
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
This article's lead section may be too short to adequately summarize the key points. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of all important aspects of the article. (July 2014)
This article may be in need of reorganization to comply with Misplaced Pages's layout guidelines. Please help by editing the article to make improvements to the overall structure. (February 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
(Learn how and when to remove this message)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Original author(s)Amazon
Developer(s)Amazon
Initial releaseAugust 25, 2006; 18 years ago (2006-08-25) (public beta)
Operating system
Available inEnglish
TypeVirtual private server
LicenseProprietary software
Websiteaws.amazon.com/ec2/

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers – hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy. In November 2010, Amazon switched its own retail website platform to EC2 and AWS.

History

See also: Timeline of Amazon Web Services

Amazon announced a limited public beta test of EC2 on August 25, 2006, offering access on a first-come, first-served basis. Amazon added two new instance types (Large and Extra-Large) on October 16, 2007. On May 29, 2008, two more types were added, High-CPU Medium and High-CPU Extra Large. There were twelve types of instances available.

Amazon added three new features on March 27, 2008, static IP addresses, availability zones, and user selectable kernels. On August 20, 2008, Amazon added Elastic Block Store (EBS) This provides persistent storage, a feature that had been lacking since the service was introduced.

Amazon EC2 went into full production when it dropped the beta label on October 23, 2008. On the same day, Amazon announced the following features:

These features were subsequently added on May 18, 2009.

Amazon EC2 was developed mostly by a team in Cape Town, South Africa led by Chris Pinkham. Pinkham provided the initial architecture guidance for EC2 and then built the team and led the development of the project along with Willem van Biljon.

Instance types

Initially, EC2 used Xen virtualization exclusively. However, on November 6, 2017, Amazon announced the new C5 family of instances that were based on a custom architecture around the KVM hypervisor, called Nitro. Each virtual machine, called an "instance", functions as a virtual private server. Amazon sizes instances based on "Elastic Compute Units". The performance of otherwise identical virtual machines may vary. On November 28, 2017, AWS announced a bare-metal instance, a departure from exclusively offering virtualized instance types.

As of January 2019, the following instance types were offered:

  • General Purpose: A1, T3, T2, M5, M5a, M4, T3a
  • Compute Optimized: C5, C5n, C4
  • Memory Optimized: R5, R5a, R4, X1e, X1, High Memory, z1d
  • Accelerated Computing: P3, P2, G3, F1
  • Storage Optimized: H1, I3, D2

As of April 2018, the following payment methods by instance were offered:

  • On-demand: pay by the hour without commitment.
  • Reserved: rent instances with one-time payment receiving discounts on the hourly charge.
  • Spot: bid-based service: runs the jobs only if the spot price is below the bid specified by bidder. The spot price is claimed to be supply-demand based, however a 2011 study concluded that the price was generally not set to clear the market, but was dominated by an undisclosed reserve price.

Cost

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels announcing price reductions at AWS Summit 2013 NYC

As of April 2018, Amazon charged about $0.0058 per hour ($4.176 per month) for the smallest "Nano Instance" (t2.nano) virtual machine running Linux or Windows. Storage-optimized instances cost as much as $4.992 per hour (i3.16xlarge). "Reserved" instances can go as low as $2.50 per month for a three-year prepaid plan. The data transfer charge ranges from free to $0.12 per gigabyte, depending on the direction and monthly volume (inbound data transfer is free on all AWS services).

EC2 costs can be analyzed using the Amazon Cost and Usage Report. There are many different cost categories for EC2 including: hourly Instance Charges, Data Transfer, EBS Volumes, EBS Volume Snapshots, and Nat Gateway.

Free tier

As of December 2010 Amazon offered a bundle of free resource credits to new account holders. The credits are designed to run a "micro" sized server, storage (EBS), and bandwidth for one year. Unused credits cannot be carried over from one month to the next.

Reserved instances

Reserved instances enable EC2 or RDS service users to reserve an instance for one or three years. The corresponding hourly rate charged by Amazon to operate the instance is 35 to 75% lower than the rate charged for on-demand instances. Reserved instances can be purchased with three different payment options: All Upfront, Partial Upfront and No Upfront. The different purchase options allow for different structuring of payment models, with a larger discount given to customers that pay their reservation upfront.

Reserved Instances are purchased based on a resource commitment. These reservations are made based on an instance type and a count of that instance type. For example, you could reserve 100 i3.large instances for a 3-year term.

In September 2016, AWS announced several enhancements to Reserved instances, introducing a new feature called scope and a new reservation type called a Convertible. In October 2017, AWS announced the allowance to subdivide the instances purchased for more flexibility.

Spot instances

Cloud providers maintain large amounts of excess capacity they have to sell or risk incurring losses. Amazon EC2 Spot instances are spare compute capacity in the AWS cloud available at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices. As a trade-off, AWS offers no SLA on these instances and customers take the risk that it can be interrupted with only two minutes of notification when Amazon needs the capacity back. Researchers from the Israeli Institute of Technology found that "they (Spot instances) are typically generated at random from within a tight price interval via a dynamic hidden reserve price". Some companies, like Spotinst, are using machine learning to predict spot interruptions up to 15 minutes in advance.

Savings Plans

In November 2019, Amazon announced Savings Plans. Savings Plans are an alternative to Reserved Instances that come in two different plan types: Compute Savings Plans and EC2 Instances Savings Plans. Compute Savings Plans allow an organization to commit to EC2 and Fargate usage with the freedom to change region, family, size, availability zone, OS and tenancy inside the lifespan of the commitment. EC2 Instance Savings plans provide a larger discount than Compute Savings Plans but are less flexible meaning a user must commit to individual instance families within a region to take advantage, but with the freedom to change instances within the family in that region.

AWS uses the Cost Explorer to automatically calculate recommendations for the commitments you should make how that commitment will look like as a monthly charge on your AWS bill. AWS Savings Plans are purchased based on hourly spend commitment. This hourly commitment is made using the discounted pricing of the savings plan you are purchasing. For example, you could commit to spending $5 per hour, on a Compute Savings Plan, for a 3-year term.

Features

Operating systems

Further information: operating system

When it launched in August 2006, the EC2 service offered Linux and later Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition. In October 2008, EC2 added the Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 operating systems to the list of available operating systems. In March 2011, NetBSD AMIs became available. In November 2012, Windows Server 2012 support was added.

Since 2006, Colin Percival, a FreeBSD developer and Security Officer, solicited Amazon to add FreeBSD. In November 2012, Amazon officially supported running FreeBSD in EC2. The FreeBSD/EC2 platform is maintained by Percival who also developed the secure deduplicating Amazon S3-cloud based backup service Tarsnap.

Amazon has their own Linux distribution based on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a low cost offering known as the Amazon Linux AMI. Version 2013.03 included: Linux kernel, Java OpenJDK Runtime Environment and GNU Compiler Collection.

On November 30, 2020, Amazon announced that it would be adding macOS to the EC2 service. Initial support was announced for macOS Mojave and macOS Catalina running on Mac Mini.

Managed Container and Kubernetes Services

Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) is a Docker registry service for Amazon EC2 instances to access repositories and images.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) a managed Kubernetes service running on top of EC2 without needing to provision or manage instances.

Persistent storage

An EC2 instance may be launched with a choice of two types of storage for its boot disk or "root device." The first option is a local "instance-store" disk as a root device (originally the only choice). The second option is to use an EBS volume as a root device. Instance-store volumes are temporary storage, which survive rebooting an EC2 instance, but when the instance is stopped or terminated (e.g., by an API call, or due to a failure), this store is lost.

The Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides raw block devices that can be attached to Amazon EC2 instances. These block devices can then be used like any raw block device. In a typical use case, this would include formatting the device with a filesystem and mounting it. In addition, EBS supports a number of advanced storage features, including snapshotting and cloning. EBS volumes can be up to 16 TB in size. EBS volumes are built on replicated storage, so that the failure of a single component will not cause data loss. EBS was introduced to the general public by Amazon in August 2008.

Amazon EBS
Amazon EBS

EBS volumes provide persistent storage independent of the lifetime of the EC2 instance, and act much like hard drives on a real server. More accurately, they appear as block devices to the operating system that are backed by Amazon's disk arrays. The OS is free to use the device however it wants. In the most common case, a file system is loaded and the volume acts as a hard drive. Another possible use is the creation of RAID arrays by combining two or more EBS volumes. RAID allows increases of speed and/or reliability of EBS. Users can set up and manage storage volumes of sizes from 1 GB to 16 TB. The volumes support snapshots, which can be taken from a GUI tool or the API. EBS volumes can be attached or detached from instances while they are running, and moved from one instance to another.

Simple Storage Service (S3) is a storage system in which data is accessible to EC2 instances, or directly over the network to suitably authenticated callers (all communication is over HTTP). Amazon does not charge for the bandwidth for communications between EC2 instances and S3 storage "in the same region." Accessing S3 data stored in a different region (for example, data stored in Europe from a US East Coast EC2 instance) will be billed at Amazon's normal rates.

S3-based storage is priced per gigabyte per month. Applications access S3 through an API. For example, Apache Hadoop supports a special s3: filesystem to support reading from and writing to S3 storage during a MapReduce job. There are also S3 filesystems for Linux, which mount a remote S3 filestore on an EC2 image, as if it were local storage. As S3 is not a full POSIX filesystem, things may not behave the same as on a local disk (e.g., no locking support).

Elastic IP addresses

Amazon Elastic IP
Amazon Elastic IP

Amazon's elastic IP address feature is similar to static IP address in traditional data centers, with one key difference. A user can programmatically map an elastic IP address to any virtual machine instance without a network administrator's help and without having to wait for DNS to propagate the binding. In this sense an Elastic IP Address belongs to the account and not to a virtual machine instance. It exists until it is explicitly removed, and remains associated with the account even while it is associated with no instance.

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides real-time monitoring to Amazon's EC2 customers on their resource utilization such as CPU, disk, network and replica lag for RDS Database replicas. CloudWatch does not provide any memory, disk space, or load average metrics without running additional software on the instance. Since December 2017 Amazon provides a CloudWatch Agent for Windows and Linux operating systems included disk and previously not available memory information, previously Amazon provided example scripts for Linux instances to collect OS information. The data is aggregated and provided through AWS management console. It can also be accessed through command line tools and Web APIs, if the customer desires to monitor their EC2 resources through their enterprise monitoring software. Amazon provides an API which allows clients to operate on CloudWatch alarms.

The metrics collected by Amazon CloudWatch enables the auto-scaling feature to dynamically add or remove EC2 instances. The customers are charged by the number of monitoring instances.

Since May 2011, Amazon CloudWatch accepts custom metrics that can be submitted programmatically via Web Services API and then monitored the same way as all other internal metrics, including setting up the alarms for them, and since July 2014 Cloudwatch Logs service is also available.

Basic Amazon CloudWatch is included in Amazon Free Tier service.

Automated scaling

Auto-scaling
Auto-scaling
Further information: autoscaling

Amazon's auto-scaling feature of EC2 allows it to automatically adapt computing capacity to site traffic. The schedule-based (e.g. time-of-the-day) and rule-based (e.g. CPU utilization thresholds) auto scaling mechanisms are easy to use and efficient for simple applications. However, one potential problem is that VMs may take up to several minutes to be ready to use, which are not suitable for time critical applications. The VM startup time is dependent on image size, VM type, data center locations, etc. The convenience of using EC2 enables you to dynamically increase capacity in accordance with demand and access resources rapidly.

Pricing

NOTE: the examples, figures and comparison charts in this section are from 2018 in the best case; please bear this in mind, as the situation has changed a lot from then.

LINUX CLOUD HOSTING: PERFORMANCE INDEX BELOW 16 ( < 2CPU, 8GB RAM)
Linux cloud hosting: performance index below 16 ( < 2CPU, 8GB RAM)
LINUX CLOUD HOSTING: PERFORMANCE INDEX 16 - 1040 (2CPU, 8GB RAM - 16CPU, 65GB RAM)
Linux cloud hosting: performance index 16 - 1040 (2CPU, 8GB RAM - 16CPU, 65GB RAM)
LINUX CLOUD HOSTING: PERFORMANCE INDEX ABOVE 1040 ( > 16CPU, 65GB RAM)
Linux cloud hosting: performance index ABOVE 1040 ( > 16CPU, 65GB RAM)

On Demand EC2 instances are priced per hour. An example of this pricing would be $0.096 per hour for a Linux, m5.large, EC2 instance in the us-east-1 region. Pricing will vary based on the instance type, region, and operating system of the instance. Public on-demand pricing for EC2 can be found on the AWS website.

The other pricing models for EC2 have different pricing models.

Spot instances also have a cost per instance hour, but the cost will change on a regular basis based on the supply of EC2 spot capacity.

Reserved Instances and Compute Savings plans are priced per hour. Each of these reservation tools has its own price per hour based on the payment option, term and reservation product being used. These prices are locked in for either a 1-year or 3-year term.

Amazon EC2 price varies from $2.5 per month for "nano" instance with 1 vCPU and 0.5 GB RAM on board to "xlarge" type of instances with 32 vCPU and 488 GB RAM billed up to $3997.19 per month.

The charts above show how Amazon EC2 pricing is compared to similar Cloud Computing services: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kamatera, and Vultr.

Amazon EC2 compared to similar cloud computing services
Amazon EC2 Microsoft Azure Google Cloud Platform Kamatera Vultr
1vCPU 0.5 GB RAM $3.29 $2.5
1vCPU 0.75 GB RAM $14.88
1vCPU 1 GB RAM $6.83 $11 $5
1vCPU 1.75 GB RAM $44.64
1vCPU 2 GB RAM $13.14 $17 $10
1vCPU 3.75 GB RAM $24.27
2vCPU 3.5 GB RAM $89.88
2vCPU 4 GB RAM $41 $20
2vCPU 7.5 GB RAM $48.55
2vCPU 8 GB RAM $52.56 $61
4vCPU 7 GB RAM $178.56
4vCPU 8 GB RAM $86 $40
4vCPU 15 GB RAM $97.09
4vCPU 15 GB RAM $134 $134
6vCPU 16 GB RAM $159 $80
8vCPU 14 GB RAM $357.12
8vCPU 16 GB RAM $184
8vCPU 30 GB RAM $194.18
8vCPU 32 GB RAM $219.64 $280 $160
8vCPU 49 GB RAM $328
8vCPU 56 GB RAM $744
16vCPU 32 GB RAM $412.53
8vCPU 65 GB RAM $408
12vCPU 65 GB RAM $626
16vCPU 32 GB RAM $388.36 $746
16vCPU 65 GB RAM $320
20vCPU 65 GB RAM $826
12vCPU 112 GB RAM $1339.20
16vCPU 112 GB RAM $1450.80
20vCPU 98 GB RAM $986
36vCPU 60 GB RAM $825.06
20vCPU 131 GB RAM $1146
32vCPU 120 GB RAM $776.72
16vCPU 224 GB RAM $1935.1
20vCPU 196 GB RAM $1466
20vCPU 262 GB RAM $1786
24vCPU 224 GB RAM $2678.40
64vCPU 240 GB RAM $1553.44
32vCPU 488 GB RAM $3997.19

Reliability

Part of an AZ in AWS's us-west-2 region, showing three datacenters with a fourth under construction

To make EC2 more fault-tolerant, Amazon engineered Availability Zones that are designed to be insulated from failures in other availability zones. Availability zones do not share the same infrastructure. Applications running in more than one availability zone can achieve higher availability.

EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy. For example, to minimize downtime, a user can set up server instances in multiple zones that are insulated from each other for most causes of failure such that one backs up the other.

Higher-availability database services, like Amazon Relational Database Service run separately from EC2 instances.

Issues

In early July 2008, the anti-spam organizations Outblaze and Spamhaus.org began blocking Amazon's EC2 address pool due to problems with the distribution of spam and malware.

On December 1, 2010, Amazon pulled its service to WikiLeaks after coming under political pressure in the US. Assange said that WikiLeaks chose Amazon knowing it would probably be kicked off the service "in order to separate rhetoric from reality". The Internet group Anonymous attempted to attack EC2 in revenge; however, Amazon was not affected by the attack.

Amazon's websites were temporarily offline on December 12, 2010, although it was initially unclear if this was due to attacks or a hardware failure. An Amazon official later stated that it was due to a hardware failure.

Shortly before 5 am ET on April 21, 2011, an outage started at EC2's Northern Virginia data center that brought down several websites, including Foursquare, Springpad, Reddit, Quora, and Hootsuite. Specifically, attempts to use Amazon's elastic-disk and database services hung, failed, or were slow. Service was restored to some parts of the data center (three of four "availability zones" in Amazon's terms) by late afternoon Eastern time that day; problems for at least some customers were continuing as of April 25. 0.07% of EBS volumes in one zone have also been lost; EBS failures were a part of normal operation even before this outage and were a risk documented by Amazon, though the number of failures and the number of simultaneous failures may find some EC2 users unprepared.

On Sunday August 6, 2011, Amazon suffered a power outage in one of their Ireland availability zones. Lightning was originally blamed for the outage; however, on August 11, Irish energy supplier ESB Networks dismissed this as a cause, but at time of writing, could not confirm what the cause of the problem was. The power outage raised multiple questions regarding Amazon's EBS infrastructure, which caused several bugs in their software to be exposed. The bugs resulted in some customers' data being deleted when recovering EBS volumes in a mid-write operation during the crash.

August 8, 2011, saw another network connectivity outage of Amazon's Northern Virginia data center, knocking out the likes of Reddit, Quora, Netflix and FourSquare. The outage lasted around 25 minutes.

Another Northern Virginia data center outage occurred on October 22, 2012, from approximately 10 am to 4 pm PT. Edmodo, Airbnb, Flipboard, Reddit, and other customers were affected. Anonymous claimed responsibility, but Amazon denied this assertion.

See also

Notes

  1. $109 for a three-year Heavy Utilization Reserved t2.micro Instances reservation amortized over thirty-six months plus one month at $0.002/hour.

References

  1. ^ Jeff Barr (30 November 2020). "New – Use Amazon EC2 Mac Instances to Build & Test macOS, iOS, ipadOS, tvOS, and watchOS Apps". AWS News Blog. Retrieved 1 December 2020.
  2. LaMonica, Martin (March 27, 2008). "Amazon Web Services adds 'resiliency' to EC2 compute service". CNET. Archived from the original on December 25, 2018. Retrieved August 1, 2009.
  3. AWS Cloud Tour 2011 | Australia: Event Highlights (video).
  4. Barr, Jeff (August 25, 2006). "Amazon EC2 Beta". Amazon Web Services Blog. Retrieved May 31, 2013.
  5. Barr, Jeff (October 16, 2007). "Amazon EC2 Gets More Muscle".
  6. Barr, Jeff (May 29, 2008). "More EC2 power". Amazon Web Services Blog. Retrieved August 1, 2009.
  7. Amazon EC2 Instances. Aws.amazon.com. Retrieved on 2013-08-09.
  8. Barr, Jeff (March 27, 2008). "New EC2 Features". Amazon Web Services Blog. Retrieved August 1, 2009.
  9. ^ Barr, Jeff (August 20, 2008). "Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Bring Us Your Data". Amazon Web Services Blog. Archived from the original on March 28, 2011. Retrieved May 31, 2013.
  10. ^ Barr, Jeff (August 23, 2008). "Big Day For EC2". Amazon Web Services Blog. Retrieved August 1, 2009.
  11. Barr, Jeff (May 18, 2009). "New Features for EC2". Amazon Web Services Blog. Retrieved August 1, 2009.
  12. "Nimbula puffs up 'cloud operating system'". The Register. June 25, 2010.
  13. "Amazon's early efforts at cloud computing? Partly accidental". June 17, 2010. Archived from the original on June 21, 2010.
  14. "Citrix and Amazon Web Services (AWS)". citrix.com. Retrieved October 23, 2013.
  15. "Now Available – Compute-Intensive C5 Instances for Amazon EC2". 6 November 2017. Retrieved November 7, 2017.
  16. "Amazon EC2 FAQs". Retrieved November 7, 2017.
  17. "AWS re:Invent 2017: NEW LAUNCH! Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances (CMP330)". YouTube. 30 November 2017. Archived from the original on 2021-12-21. Retrieved December 4, 2017.
  18. J. Dejun, G. Pierre and C.-H. Chi. EC2 Performance Analysis for Resource Provisioning of Service-Oriented Applications. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Non-Functional Properties and SLA Management in Service-Oriented Computing, November 2009.
  19. Lardinois, Frederic (November 28, 2017). "AWS launches bare metal instances". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 4, 2017.
  20. "Amazon EC2 Instance Types – Amazon Web Services (AWS)". Amazon Web Services, Inc. Retrieved 2019-01-28.
  21. "Amazon EC2 Pricing". Retrieved December 5, 2012.
  22. Ben-Yehuda, Orna Agmon; Ben-Yehuda, Muli; Schuster, Assaf; Tsafrir, Dan (2011). Deconstructing Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing. The Taub Faculty of Computer Science, Technion (Technical report). Archived from the original on 2022-08-11. Retrieved 2020-12-27.
  23. ^ Wu, Xiaohu; Pellegrini, Francesco De; Gao, Guanyu; Casale, Giuliano (2019-12-24). "A Framework for Allocating Server Time to Spot and On-Demand Services in Cloud Computing". ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems. 4 (4). Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): 1–31. arXiv:1902.01321. doi:10.1145/3366682. hdl:10044/1/74507. ISSN 2376-3639. S2CID 59599850.
  24. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Cloud Computing Servers. Aws.amazon.com (2014-07-01). Retrieved on 2014-07-01.
  25. EC2 selector tool. Simplified and comprehensive EC2 price list updated in real time.
  26. Barr, Jeff (June 29, 2011). "AWS Lowers its Pricing Again! – No Inbound Data Transfer Fees and Lower Outbound Data Transfer for All Services including Amazon CloudFront". Typepad. Archived from the original on July 7, 2011. Retrieved July 6, 2011.
  27. "AWS Cost Analysis: Amazon EC2 Costs | Strake". eightlake.com. January 2024. Retrieved 2024-01-26.
  28. "Announcing AWS Free Usage Tier".
  29. "AWS Free Tier". Amazon Web Services, Inc.
  30. "FAQs". Amazon Web Services, Inc. Retrieved 2015-07-31.
  31. "Additional Reserved Instance Options for Amazon EC2". Amazon. December 2011.
  32. "A Complete Guide to AWS Reservations | Strake". getstrake.com. Retrieved 2023-02-28.
  33. Santos, Alan (September 29, 2016). "A Quick Start Guide To AWS Regional & Convertible Reservations". CloudHealth Technologies. Archived from the original on 2016-10-05. Retrieved 2016-10-04.
  34. Hanley Frank, Blair (March 14, 2017). "AWS Follows Google With Reserved Instance Flexibility Changes". PC World. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  35. ^ Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. "Deconstructing Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing" (PDF). Technion University. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  36. Hall, Susan (December 26, 2017). "Spotinst: Making the Most of Cheaper Excess Compute Capacity". The News Stack. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  37. Miller, Ron (October 25, 2017). "Spotinst delivers spot cloud infrastructure services at discount prices". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
  38. "Savings Plans – Amazon Web Services". Amazon Web Services, Inc.
  39. "Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances". 7 November 2019.
  40. "Savings Plans FAQ | Amazon Web Services". Amazon Web Services, Inc.
  41. Santis, Peter (July 14, 2021). "Running on AWS Savings Plans? You can still reduce your cloud bill". CAST AI. Retrieved 2021-09-13.
  42. "A Complete Guide to AWS Reservations | Strake". getstrake.com. Retrieved 2023-02-28.
  43. Shankland, Stephen (October 23, 2008). "Amazon's Linux cloud computing out of beta, joined by Windows". CNET. Retrieved October 24, 2008.
  44. "Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Running Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server". October 23, 2008. Archived from the original on 1 December 2008. Retrieved October 25, 2008.
  45. Migeon, Jean-Yves (March 13, 2011). "NetBSD now runs under Amazon EC2". NetBSD Blog. Retrieved August 9, 2013.
  46. "Windows Server 2012 Now Available on AWS". November 19, 2012. Retrieved March 26, 2014.
  47. Barr, Jeff (28 November 2012). "Interview - Live from AWS re:Invent Colin Percival, FreeBSD Developer". Amazon Web Services 28.11.2012. Archived from the original on 2021-12-21. Retrieved 25 May 2015.
  48. "AWS Marketplace – Additional EC2 Operating System Support (FreeBSD, Debian, CentOS)". Amazon. 23 November 2012.
  49. Percival, Colin. "How to build FreeBSD/EC2 images". Colin Percival. Retrieved 25 May 2015.
  50. Percival, Colin. "FreeBSD on EC2". Colin Percival. Retrieved 25 May 2015.
  51. "Colin Percival". awsmarketplace. Amazon Web Services, Inc. Retrieved 25 May 2015.
  52. Percival, Colin. "About Tarsnap". Tarsnap and C. Percival. Retrieved 25 May 2015.
  53. "Amazon Linux AMI 2013.03 Release Notes". AWS web site. Retrieved May 31, 2013.
  54. ^ Krazit, Tom (2018-12-11). "Amazon Web Services reveals a public road map for its cloud container services". GeekWire. Retrieved 2023-12-24.
  55. "Introduction to EBS Volumes". 1201 Restart.com. December 2010. Archived from the original on 2011-05-13. Retrieved December 18, 2010.
  56. "What is an Elastic IP". June 2, 2022. Archived from the original on August 12, 2022. Retrieved June 16, 2022.
  57. "Working with Read Replicas of MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL DB Instances - Amazon Relational Database Service". docs.aws.amazon.com.
  58. "Amazon CloudWatch introduces a new CloudWatch Agent with AWS Systems Manager Integration for Unified Metrics and Logs Collection". aws.amazon.com. 14 December 2017. Archived from the original on 2 March 2020. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
  59. "Monitoring Memory and Disk Metrics for Amazon EC2 Linux Instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud". docs.aws.amazon.com.
  60. "AWS Developer Forums: User Profile for Henry@AWS". forums.aws.amazon.com.
  61. "GorillaStack CloudWatch vs CloudTrail". GorillaStack. 2019-09-17.
  62. "Welcome - Amazon CloudWatch". docs.aws.amazon.com.
  63. AWS in Action & Wittig (2016), pp. 372–375.
  64. "AWS Release Notes". Amazon Web Services, Inc.
  65. "Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Logs". Amazon Web Services, Inc.
  66. "AWS Auto Scaling". Amazon Web Services, Inc. Retrieved 2019-09-26.
  67. Mao, Ming; M. Humphrey (2012). "A Performance Study on the VM Startup Time in the Cloud". 2012 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Cloud Computing. p. 423. doi:10.1109/CLOUD.2012.103. ISBN 978-1-4673-2892-0. S2CID 1285357.
  68. "Top 15 AWS Services for 2023". 17 September 2022. Archived from the original on 23 October 2022. Retrieved 23 October 2022.
  69. "Amazon AWS vs Microsoft Azure vs Google Cloud vs Kamatera vs Vultr - 5 Best Cloud Services". 5 Best Cloud Services. 2017-12-02. Retrieved 2017-12-24.
  70. Wittig, Andreas; Wittig, Michael (2016). Amazon Web Services in Action. Manning Press. pp. 290–294. ISBN 978-1-61729-288-0.
  71. Krebs, Brian (July 1, 2008). "Amazon: Hey Spammers, Get Off My Cloud!". Security Fix. The Washington Post. Archived from the original on December 3, 2013.
  72. MacAskill, Ewen (December 2, 2010). "WikiLeaks website pulled by Amazon after US political pressure". The Guardian. London.
  73. "WikiLeaks got kicked off Amazon on purpose, says Assange". CNET. Retrieved 2023-10-23.
  74. "Julian Assange answers your questions". The Guardian. 2010-12-03. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2023-10-23.
  75. Weaver, Matthew; Tran, Mark (December 9, 2010). "WikiLeaks cables: Shell, Operation Payback and Assange for the Nobel prize – as it happened". The Guardian. Retrieved May 31, 2013.
  76. Arthur, Charles (December 13, 2010). "Amazon says outage in Europe due to hardware failure, not hacking attack". The Guardian. Retrieved May 31, 2013.
  77. Pepitone, Julianne (April 21, 2011). "Amazon EC2 outage downs Reddit, Quora". CNN.
  78. Lohr, Steve (April 22, 2011). "Amazon Malfunction Raises Doubts About Cloud Computing". The New York Times.
  79. "Cloud storm, EC2 startup takedown". DoesWhat. April 21, 2011. Archived from the original on May 24, 2011. Retrieved June 4, 2011.
  80. "6:18 pm PDT April 21, 2011, entry, says "all Availability Zones except one have been functioning normally for the past 5 hours."". amazon.com. Archived from the original on 2008-04-20.
  81. "April 25 entry". amazon.com. Archived from the original on 2008-04-20.
  82. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) section "Volume Durability"
  83. Clark, Jack (August 8, 2011). "Lightning strikes Amazon's European cloud". ZDNet.
  84. Kunert, Paul (August 11, 2011). "Amazon web outage not caused by lightning". The Register.
  85. Clark, Jack (August 10, 2011). "AWS cloud accidentally deletes customer data". ZDNet.
  86. Musil, Steven (August 9, 2011). "Amazon cloud outage downs Netflix, Quora". CNET.
  87. Tibken, Shara (October 22, 2012). "Amazon cloud outage impacts Reddit, Airbnb, Flipboard". CNET.

External links

Amazon
People
Current
Former
Facilities
Products and
services
Subsidiaries
Cloud
computing
Services
Devices
Technology
Media
Retail
Logistics
Former
Litigation
Other
Unions
Category
Cloud computing
Business models
Technologies
Applications
Platforms
Infrastructure
Categories: