EC2 overview

The AWS EC2 service provides the capability to use virtual machine instances in the AWS cloud. This service would fall squarely into the IaaS cloud category and is one of the basic services on which a lot of cloud PaaS and SaaS offerings are built. The EC2 service lets us run many versions of Windows and Linux based operating systems and gives us complete control of the operating system and its capabilities.

Virtualization types

There are two different virtualization types supported on EC2 that can deliver differing features and, in the past, differing performance to the visualized operating system and they are defined as the following:

• Fully visualized or Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM)
• VMs with some direct...