Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Task 1: Create an EC2 instance

2.(a) What is a Security Group?

A security group acts as a virtual firewall for your instance to control inbound and outbound traffic.

5.(a) What is an AMI?

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) provides the information required to launch an instance.

5.(b) What are the Free tier AMIs?

The AWS Free Tier provides customers the ability to explore and try out AWS services free of charge up to specified limits for each service.

5.(c) How many Free tier AMIs are available in AWS?

There are currently 17 Free tier AMIs available in AWS.

6.(a) What are the characteristics of this instance?

1 vCPU, 1GB memory, EBS only, Network low to moderate performance, support IPv6

6.(b) What does EBS stand for?

Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volume is a durable, block-level storage device that you can attach to your instances.

6.(c) What type of EBS volume is your AMI based on?

There are SSD and HHD volume types. The instance created is of HHD volume type.

9.(a) What is the termination protection function?

Prevents a user to terminate an instance inadvertently.

9.(b) What is the CloudWatch? Why is it useful?

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events, providing you with a unified view of AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers.

It is useful to detect anomalous behavior in your environments, set alarms, visualize logs and metrics side by side, take automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and discover insights to keep your applications running smoothly.

9.(c) True or False: monitoring is only available if you pay additional fees

False. Only granular monitoring requires fee payment.

9.(d) What is the role of the Tenancy option?

Tenancy defines how EC2 instances are distributed across physical hardware. There are three tenancy options:

  • Shared (default) — Multiple AWS accounts may share the same physical hardware.

  • Dedicated Instance (dedicated) — Your instance runs on single-tenant hardware.

  • Dedicated Host (host) — Your instance runs on a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use, an isolated server with configurations that you can control.

Task 3: Turn the instance into a Web Server

1.(a) Why does the browser show nothing?

Because there is no application listening and replying to requests on port 80 (default HTTP port).

2.(a) What do you observe?

Several plots with almost no activity.

2.(b) Why cannot the browser connect to the web server?

Because the access to the webserver port 80 is blocked by default by AWS.