From the course: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C01) Cert Prep: 3 Core Services

EC2

- [Narrator] Your manager comes by and taps you on the shoulder. "Hey, we need to get a new server for an app the dev team is creating. Can you get it set up for them?" "Sure!" You say, enthusiastically. After all, you love researching and buying new computers. How hard could this be? You soon realize that there are a lot of moving parts in purchasing a server. You need to know how much storage it needs, how much memory the dev team requires, the operating system, the bells and whistles. Even once you manage to find a server that fits all the requirements posed by the dev team, you then have to get it through all the bureaucratic ladders up and down the command chain in your team, and the engineering team. And once you thought you were finally ready to get it purchased, you find out you have to push it through finance, too. And the finance department is not happy with the huge, unexpected cost of buying an expensive server. You spend a little while convincing the finance department to approve the cost, and you order it. By this point it's already been a month since your manager initially asked you to purchase this and the dev team is getting impatient. Now, you wait for it to be delivered in a week. But wait, you aren't done just because it's delivered. Now you have to set it up and make it ready for dev team to use. All in all, it would take you months to get that server up and running that the dev team wanted. And by the time you deliver it to them, they have one thing to say. "Oh, yeah, we've been going further into the development process, and turns out we need double the amount of storage that we initially requested." Back to the first step. There's an easier way to do this instead of spending months of your time drowning in bureaucratic headaches. You can log into AWS and spin up a virtual server, called an instance, in seconds with the exact specifications that your dev team requested. And if their needs change, you can easily adjust the existing server or just spin up a new one. This service is called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, and it's one of the most widely used services in the AWS. Amazon EC2 allows you to launch applications and servers when you need them without upfront financial commitments. It's integrated with many other AWS services, is reliable and secure, and allows you or your company to quickly and inexpensively spin up instances of virtual servers for all of your different needs.

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