In a previous blog, I mentioned I was looking into becoming certified as an AWS Cloud Practioner and wrote a piece briefly going over what exactly is cloud computing. As my journey continues, I want to share a bit of what the prep course, provided by Amazon, for the certification exam entails. As I began the course, I realized I would have benefitted from someone giving me an oversimplified frame of reference to some of the concepts before I dove deeper. This blog will do just that, focusing specifically on EC2, EBS, and S3.
What is EC2?
EC2 stands for Elastic Cloud Compute and it is one of the core cloud computing services offered by AWS. If we think of the cloud as renting another computer as an oversimplified explanation, then EC2 acts as that computer’s server. So if you were to visit a website that is being run off of an AWS Cloud, then that website that is being hosted would be running off a EC2 server, or an instance. A single EC2 server is referred to as an EC2 instance. Creating an instance allows you to boot up a server on the fly and pay for what you need rather than building and maintaining a physical server.
What is EBS?
EBS stands for Elastic Block Store, and it acts as the hard-drive (or SSD) to an EC2 instance’s computer. It acts as the storage volume for the instance. While an instance does have a “root” volume, that “root” would be deleted the moment you terminate that EC2 instance. An EBS runs independently of the EC2, can be added and removed from that instance as you desire, and will persist after termination of the EC2.
What is S3?
S3 stands for Simple Storage Service and a single S3 unit is typically referred to as an S3 bucket. This is because S3 acts as basically a big storage bucket for you to hold objects, such as files, images, etc in a folder structure. S3 buckets are independent of EC2 instances, and can act as their own entity, whereas EBS volumes need a EC2 instance to be utilized. S3 buckets also happen to offer nearly infinite storage space.
That’s it for my brief introduction into these core services and structures, this is meant to give you a frame of reference as you (and I) learn more about AWS.
