Introduction to Amazon EC2: Your First AWS Virtual Machine

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is one of AWS’s most essential services, providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). It allows users to rent virtual machines (EC2 instances) on demand, enabling scalable and flexible cloud computing.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

✅ What EC2 is and why it’s fundamental

✅ Key components of EC2 instances

✅ Instance types and configurations

✅ Bootstrapping with EC2 User Data

✅ AWS Free Tier eligibility

1. What is Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It enables users to:

• Launch virtual machines (EC2 instances).
• Store data on EBS (Elastic Block Store) volumes.
• Scale applications automatically with Auto Scaling Groups (ASG).
• Distribute traffic using Elastic Load Balancers (ELB).

EC2 is the backbone of AWS computing, making on-demand cloud infrastructure accessible for businesses of all sizes.

2. Choosing an EC2 Instance

When launching an EC2 instance, you can customize the following:

🔹 Operating System Choices