Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Using Amazon EC2 eliminates your need to invest in hardware upfront, so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing your need to forecast traffic.
Now these are the official language which I found comparatively hard for new users who don't have that much knowledge about AWS services or web knowledge in general. I will try to explain it as easilypossible.
But first we need no understand how we see any website on the internet?
Websites are nothing but pages, documents and files stored in a PC ( which can have any operating system like Linux, windows, mac OS or any operating system ). When we are typing an URL in the address bar of a browser we are accessing the default page of the PC which is set to home page of the website. Now you can ask or at least i had the question when we open our PC we see something like below:-
So, how do we see the homepage? So there is something called Apache which if installed has a config file where you can define the direction where you want your PC to go when typed that address. Also what we do on our PC is that we install Windows/Linux which has boot logo and other things when we open the PC. But this websites are available 24*7. This means this PC or as the technical term goes Server remains on all the time.
Now, that we have understood how a website is viewed. We can start with the EC2. So, the complete form of EC2 is Elastic cloud compute. Though this may sound like a fancy or hard to remember name but there is logic behind this name. They could have named it Server or Virtual Machine ( as Microsoft Azure : which is another cloud platform provided by Microsoft). But the reason behind this naming to me is that :-
Elastic because the EBS volume attached to one EC2 machine can be changed anytime. So you can increase or decrease the memory size of the Server or EC2 machine in this instance. Also another reason for this can be, is that it can be scaled on demand. What this means? This means that a server has only a limited capability. If a lot of user hits the server or the website at the same time it can not handle all the requests. So the user has to wait to get access to the website and this makes the website slow. So to handle a lot of users AWS makes a copy of the EC2 and runs itself when the no of users increases. But for that5 to happen we need to know about auto scaling group and Application load balancer. But that is too far-fetched. So what I wanted to tell you is as it can increase and decrease the number of servers as an Elastic rubber hence the name Eastic Cloud Compute.
How to setup EC2 and install LAMP and access your website is discussed on another post.
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