Introduction

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most popular cloud providers out there. It consists of over 15 regions geographically located across 4 continents, and provides over 70 different services. It serves customers in over 190 countries, including several governments. Elastic Compute Cloud, better known as EC2, launched in 2006, and is one of the most popular services of AWS. Some of the most popular components of EC2 are:

• Instances (virtual machines)
• Volumes (disks)
• Amazon Machine Image or AMI (disk snapshots)
• Security groups (firewalls)
• Elastic Load Balancers (application and network load balancers)
• Auto scaling groups (to scale instances)

Most of the basic building blocks for running a simple application are provided by AWS EC2 itself.