Exam Essentials

Understand the elements required to provision an EC2 instance. An instance requires a base OS (AMI) and—optionally—an application stack, an instance type for its hardware profile, and either an EBS or an instance volume for storage.

Understand the sources, pricing, and availability of EC2 AMIs. The Quick Start and Marketplace AMIs are supported by Amazon or a recognized third-party vendor, which may not be true of AMIs selected from the Community collection. In any case, you should confirm whether using a particular AMI will incur extra charges beyond the normal EC2 usage.

Understand how EC2 instance types determine the compute power of your instance. Instance types are divided into type families, each of which focuses on a functional niche (general purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized, accelerated computing, and storage optimized). Your application needs and budget will determine which instance type you choose.

Understand the differences between...