In this section, we're going to take a look at selecting the instance type and size as we continue launching our instance. We'll discuss the general types their features, and some good use cases for each. 

The first instance we're going to discuss is a general purpose instance type known as T3s and T2s.

T3 instances are good candidates for the development environment, micro-services, and so on.

Here are some of the features of T3:

• Based on Intel®...

Now that we have learned about the instance types, let's continue launching our instance:

In the second step for launching our instance, we need to select the instance type and size.

To stay on the free tier, let's select a t2.micro. This is a general purpose instance that will provide one virtual CPU and, 1 GB of memory, and will not have any instance storage.

Click on Next: Configure Instance Details to go to the next step:

On this page, we're pretty much going to leave everything as the default settings.

However, we do want to make sure that we get a public IP address for our instance so we can log in to it. So, choose Enable on Auto-assign Public IP, then click Next: Add Storage:

The next decision we have to make is the size and type of storage volumes to attach to our instance. So, in the next section we will discuss EC2 storage...

In the previous section, we looked at the available instance types. In this section, we're going to look at the options for filesystem storage for our instance. We will cover the available options, which include local instance storage and network-attached elastic block storage.

Instance storage is SSD, or hard disk storage, that is installed in the host machine. Since it is local, you can get high disk throughput and high input/output per second, known as IOPS. However, one big caveat is the ephemeral, temporary nature of instance storage. When your instance is running, it is occupying a slot in the hypervisor of a host server. So, it has access to its share of the host machine&apos...

In the previous section, we discussed the available storage options for EC2 instances. The next step to launching our instance is to create a security group. In this section, we're going to show you how to create a security group, add rules, and complete the launch of our instance.

Now we've reached step 6 of launching our instance: configuring the security group.

Security groups allow us to protect our instance with firewall rules. We can allow traffic into our instance by protocol and source. Note that we have to have a security group associated with our instance. A security group could be associated with more than one instance.

So, for example, we can create a single security group for all of our web server instances if we would like. All traffic is implicitly denied by default. So, if you don't specify a rule for a particular protocol, then that...

An AMI is an image of the filesystem for your boot volume. A base AMI contains an operating system. However, you can launch AMIs that have applications already installed and pre-configured.

These are available from the AWS marketplace or the AWS community, or you can launch custom AMIs that you configure for yourself.

When you click on Quick Start, you will get the following screen:

You can select the Free tier only checkbox to filter the available AMIs.

These include Linux varieties such as Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, and Amazon's own Linux variety, which is optimized to the AWS environment and most closely resembles Red Hat. You can also select the Windows Server operating system, some with SQL Server...

In this chapter, we learned about AMIs and where to locate them. We learned about the five general categories of instance types, their features, and suitable workloads for each. We discussed the storage options for EC2 instances, and showed how to attach these volumes when launching an instance.

In Chapter 3, Logging in to EC2 Instances, we're going to learn more about the key pairs and logging in to EC2 instances, and the difference between Linux instances and Windows.