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.
