Learning about Amazon EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a fancy name for a server. Amazon has not invented a brand-new type of computer. At the end of the day, all the fancy nomenclature that is used by AWS and other cloud vendors boils down to a bunch of servers, storage, and networking equipment housed in a data center.
Their secret sauce is as follows:
- Standardizing the management, security, and growth of this infrastructure
- Quickly meeting the client demand for their services in minutes and not months
- Taking full advantage of virtualization technologies and being able to slice one computer to act like many computers
Many of their main competitors offer the ability to spin up resources quickly as well, but there are still some data center vendors that require users to go through a long cycle, so it can be weeks or months before you can start using the provisioned resources, and it could take just as long to decommission these resources. When you...
