Chapter 3. Using virtual servers: EC2

It’s impressive what you can achieve with the computing power of the smartphone in your pocket or the laptop in your bag. But if your task requires massive computing power or high network traffic or needs to run reliably 24/7, a virtual server is a better fit. With a virtual server, you’ll get a part of a server located in a data center. On AWS, virtual servers are offered by the service called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

3.1. Exploring a virtual server

A virtual server is part of a physical server that’s isolated by software from other virtual servers on the same physical server; it consists of CPUs, memory, networking interfaces, and storage. The physical server is also called the host server, and the virtual servers running on it are called guests. A hypervisor is responsible for isolating the guests from each other and for scheduling requests to the hardware. Figure 3.1 shows these layers of server virtualization.

3.2. Monitoring and debugging a virtual server

3.3. Shutting down a virtual server

3.4. Changing the size of a virtual server

3.5. Starting a virtual server in another data center

3.6. Allocating a public IP address

3.7. Adding an additional network interface to a virtual server

3.8. Optimizing costs for virtual servers

3.9. Summary