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The global public cloud share accounts for 32%, and AWS offers scalable and affordable infrastructure in more than 190 countries. Amazon EC2 is one of AWS's most potential and largely utilized services. Amazon provides a wide range of services, but it must be mentioned that AWS EC2 is the main computing component in the pyramid of technology. EC2 makes the regular work of the developers smoother by offering safe and resizable computing capacity in the cloud.
Amazon EC2 is an elastic computing cloud providing scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. With AWS EC2 instance types, you can eliminate the need for investing in hardware upfront, and this is easy to develop or deploy apps faster. Also, you can launch as many instances as possible.
Amazon EC2 provides the widest computing platform with more than 600 instances to choose from, according to the workload. Therefore, today we have brought this a complete guide that can help you find all the necessary information about Amazon Web Service (AWS) EC2 Instance type.
Amazon EC2 instance refers to a virtual server in Amazon’s Elastic compute cloud (EC2) that allows for the running of applications on the AWS infrastructure. AWS is a thorough and developing cloud computing platform. EC2 allows business enterprises to run applications in the computing platform and serve as an unlimited set of virtual machines.
Amazon offers multiple instances with various CPU and memory configurations to meet the user's demand. Every AWS EC2 type instance is of different sizes to adjust to certain workload demands.
Instances are made from Amazon Machine Images, similar to templates configured with an OS to identify the operating platform of the user. Users can choose an AMI offered by AWS or even make their own AMI and utilize them.
When you know how to launch an EC2 instance, this is the time to specify the instance type that can be used for the host computer. Each instance type offers different computing capabilities, memory, and storage, and they are grouped together based on instance families ahead.
Your role here is to decide on the type of instance based on the application requirements you plan to run on your instance. Each EC2 Instance had a consistent and predictable CPU capacity regardless of its underlying hardware.
Using EC2, a few resources of the host computer can be dedicated to the particular instance, like CPU, instance storage, memory, etc. It could also share other resources of the host computer, like network and disk subsystems, among multiple instances.
If any particular instance is overused or underused, loads are shared among instances accordingly. Each instance type offers higher or lower minimum performance from shared resources.
The various types of Amazon EC2 instances are as follows:
These are the most popular instances because various business groups prefer them. They belong to the M and T families consisting of two types of instances:
M4-type instances are the latest generation of general-purpose instances. These provide a proper balance of computing and network resources and serve as a great option for systems with high necessity for microservices.
These instances are perfect for running applications such as web servers, code repositories, and test environments. Arm-based AWS graviton3 processors power Amazon EC2 M7g instances, and they offer the most suitable price performances in Amazon EC2 for general-purpose network resources.
These AWS EC2 instance types are utilized in those systems which demand a high CPU load with properly balanced memory utilization. These instance types are a mixture of CPU, memory storage, and networking capacity that helps you select the most suitable resources ideal for the system.
These instances can be employed in the following two situations: Relational (MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra) databases with high performance. These instances are also perfect for automation applications in electronic gadgets, in-memory caches, and analysis of huge data.
These instance types are ideal for Graphics Processing Units and graphics-intensive applications such as game streaming and rendering.
These instance types are demonstrated by the I2 and D2 INSTANCE FAMILIES. I2 instances comprise huge SSDs for random I/Os needed by databases and data warehouses. These instances are suitable for NoSQL databases like Cassandra and OLTP. These instances are required for caching, indexing, streaming, and online transaction processing in high-frequency systems.
A vast number of Amazon EC2 instances can be utilized in AWS. In a single family of instances, there are 18 different configurations. So, it gets difficult to comprehend the right instance type for a particular workload. If you have a compute-intensive application that makes many floating-point calculations, an accelerated instance is a suitable option.
Various technical limitations and the local storage limits on different instances should also be considered while choosing the best instance type for a workload. Along with this, business protocols should also be considered, which can influence the choice among the instances. IaaS clouds lower infrastructure costs and raises the potential of a company to adhere to the alterations in business situations. The huge choice among instance types can be confusing and worsen the performance.
Hence, a proper and detailed insight into the variations of the instances along with the features of the workload is necessary, including short-term bursts in CPU load.
Sometimes you might feel that the instance is overused or underused depending upon your need. In that case, you can alter the size of the instance. Let’s take an example, if the t2.small instance is very small for the particular workload, you can alter it to an instance type that goes perfectly with the workload. You also have the option to migrate from an existing instance to a new one to get the privilege of some new characteristics of the instance.
There are different instance settings, like security groups, tags, termination protection, etc., that you need to work on when modifying an instance other than resizing it. Let us discuss on most important instance settings that should be learned or practiced thoroughly.
You can always add or edit tags assigned to an instance when necessary. Tags will make tracking instances easy, especially when there are multiple environments. Let us know how to edit tags in the AWS EC2 Instance.
Click on Instance Settings and choose the “attach to auto-scaling” option.
You can change the state of an instance from the AWS management console with a single click only. Three popular states of an instance can be defined as given below.
For this purpose, go to the Instance State option on the EC2 Dashboard from the navigation pane and click on the desired state, like Stop, Reboot, or Terminate.
It will add an additional level of security if you click the terminate option by mistake. This step will make sure that no instance is terminated accidentally but intentionally.
Go to the Instance Settings first and choose the “Change termination protection” option here.
If the current setting of your Instance is disabled, then click on Yes to Enable.
Now Select the instance state, and click on the Terminate option. AWS will immediately notify here that instance is termination protection enabled and will not delete it accidentally.
To change the user data, go to the Instance Settings first and choose the view/change user data option.
Now modify or edit the user data fields and click on the Save option at the end.
The process may sound tough at first glance. You can always learn the process like a pro with little practice and effort. Still, if you encounter any problems, join our AWS training and certification course and master everything from scratch.
You can also change the AWS EC2 instance type from AWS CLI or Management Console.
How to change the AWS EC2 instance type from the AWS console?
First, log in to the AWS management console and select the EC2 instance you want to change from the EC2 dashboard.
Step 1: Stop the instance
After you have planned which instance you want to choose, select that by selecting the checkbox and stop it by clicking on Actions -> Instance State -> Stop.
Step 2: Change the instance type
After stopping the instance as per your choice, choose the same instance and select Actions -> Instance settings -> Change instance type.
Step 3: Select the new instance type
Now you will notice a small modal box with a dropdown menu where you can select the new instance type as per your convenience.
Step 4 : Verify the changes you have made after selecting the new instance
The change in the instance will be shown instantly in the console on the description tab after you have made the change in the AWS EC2 instance type.
As per your needs, you may find your instance either over-utilized or under-utilized. If this is the case, you should change the size of the instance based on requirements.
For example, if your instance is too small as per the workload, you should change it to another instance type appropriate for the workload. In a few cases, you may be interested in migrating from older instances to new-generation instance types to take advantage of some extra features and support for IPV6.
If the root device for your instance is an EBS volume, then you can resize instances by simply changing their instance type. The process is known as the resizing instance type here. If the root device for the instance is an instance store volume, you can migrate your application to a completely new instance by defining the type you need.
When you are resizing an instance, you should select an instance type first that is compatible with the configuration of the instance. If there is some compatibility issue, then you should migrate the application to a new instance with a particular instance type as required.
Every time you are resizing an instance, the resized instance has the same number of instance store volumes as specified when the original instance was launched. To add more instance store volumes, you should migrate the application to a new instance by specifying the instance type and instance store volumes. One exception to the rule when resizing to storage-optimized instance types is that by default, it contains a higher number of volumes, and you can use them based on requirements.
You can change the size of an instance only if it is compatible in the following ways:
This is vital stopping an instance before you change its instance type. When starting or stopping an instance, you need to focus on the following steps:
Once you are sure of all considerations to keep in mind when changing the instance settings, this is time to take real action using the AWS Management Console.
When you want to move a particular instance to any other instance type, you must migrate it by creating an image of your instance and launch a new instance by defining its state or type properly. To keep the hosting uninterrupted, take the elastic IP address associated with the original instance and associate the same with the new instance. Once it is copied, you can terminate the original ones.
Here are a few steps to follow while migrating an AWS EC2 Instance:
Step 5: Initiate the instance
After you have verified the change in instance type as per your choice you can proceed and start the server.
How to change AWS EC2 instance types from AWS CLI?
At first, AWS CLI needs to be installed and configured by the following process:
Now, follow the below-mentioned steps to change the AWS EC2 instance type:
Step 1: Decide on the instance ID of your preferred instance.
For this, you just need to log in to the AWS management console, or AWS CLI commands can also be utilized to see the various instances.
Step 2: Stop the instance
The following AWS CLI command can be used to stop the instance
Step 3: Check whether the instance has stopped.
Step 4: Change the AWS EC2 instance type with AWS CLI command
The following AWS CLI command will change the aws ec2 instance type from t2.medium to t2.small
Step 5: Check if the instance type has changed
You can use the same command utilized in step 3 to check if the aws ec2 instance type is changed as per your choice.
Step 6: Initiate the instance
You can use the following command to start the instance.
Amazon EC2 decreases the time needed to get and boot new server instances and lets the user scale capacity at a faster rate as per the alterations in the computing requirements. Amazon EC2 also saves the financial resources of computing by letting you pay only for the capacity utilized. Amazon EC2 allows for ascendable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. Companies use AWS cloud engineers to create and utilize applications rapidly without the need to invest in hardware resources. If you wish to become a cloud engineer, read our blog about required essential skills for aspiring cloud engineers, to learn and grow in this trending field.
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