general-knowledge on Alperen Doc

reserved-instances-savings-plans

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reserved Instances and Savings Plans#

Companies can spend a lot of money on cloud servers, and part of building on AWS is optimizing your spend and getting the most out of it.

Initially, AWS allowed you to “reserve” an instance. This meant:

You commit to paying for at least a certain amount of compute on a specific EC2 instance type, for a period of 1-3 years.
In return for your commitment, AWS gives you a significant discount on that compute.

It’s like buying in bulk, but it comes with constraints. The reservation is tied to a specific instance type and region (sometimes even a specific availability zone, or AZ).

spot-instances

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Spot Instances#

Savings plans are great, but what if you want to save even more money? Allow me to introduce you to spot instances.

Imagine you’re in AWS’ shoes. You have to build out new racks of servers to keep up with demand, and you want to streamline things, so you install not just what you need today but what you think you’ll need for the next few years.

This leads to a problem: what to do with all the new capacity that’s not being used yet?

auto-scaling-groups

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Auto Scaling Groups#

The process works fine for one server, but if we needed hundreds of servers?

Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) help with this. We can give AWS an AMI and tell it how many instances we want.

This gets even more powerful as we instrument our servers. If a server starts to get busy, AWS can automatically provision more. If servers are sitting idle, we can reduce the server count.

aws-compute-service

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Additional Compute Services#

AWS offers a range of purpose-built services designed to streamline specific use cases—from application deployment and data processing to web hosting and hybrid cloud setups. Let’s take a quick tour of some of these powerful solutions.

aws-storage

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon EC2 instance store#

Amazon EC2 instance store isn’t a stand-alone AWS block storage service. Rather, it refers to the block-level storage that is physically attached to the EC2 instance host computer. Depending on the type of instance, EC2 instance store might come attached as the default storage. Since its data is lost when an instance is stopped or terminated, EC2 instance store is best for temporary memory-based storage needs like buffers, caches, and scratch data. It is not recommended for applications that require data retention.