Member-only story
What Does it Mean to Start an EC2 Instance?
Or any VM in the cloud?
In a program I volunteer for, someone asked what it means to “start an EC2 instance.” I thought I’d give explaining it a shot, given what I understand about AWS.
Explain like I’m a 5 Year Old
Amazon is more than just a company that lets you buy things online. They have a lot of people that work together to run a huge number of computers, that are all connected to each other in a “cloud.” This huge number of people are part of Amazon Web Services, or AWS.
One of the main things that people at AWS let you do is basically rent a computer. This computer can be really small or really large, and the renting process is almost instant. Once you rent the computer, you can install whatever you want on it, and you pay for as long as you rent it and it’s on.
Renting a computer is like renting a car, but you can do it by the minute. You tell Amazon how big of a car you want, and they charge you for as long as you drive it around. Once you decide to shut off the computer, you “return” the car and don’t have to pay any more.
If you rent it and turn it off, you just pay to store whatever data that computer was using, unless you decide to delete that too.
Also if you want, you can pay to have that computer be able to talk to other computers, in case you want to run a website or something else like a gaming server.
… Like I’m a 15 Year Old
The computer you’re reading this on, whether a mobile or desktop device, reaches out and talks to lots of other machines just like it. There are companies that run services where you can rent those machines to do any sort of work you’d like. Amazon’s tech arm, AWS, lets you rent servers through a service they call “Elastic Compute Cloud”, or EC2.
They let you rent servers with more RAM or CPU, in case you need to run a more resource intensive service, or they offer machines so small they act a free tier, if you just want to run a very simple program on their service.
Hitting the “launch instance” button on AWS, or using some other means, like other programs or the terminal, sets up your rental of one virtual computer. A…
