Where Do I Go from Here?

You can use Amazon EC2 with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, a service that enables you to create an isolated portion of the AWS cloud called a VPC. With Amazon VPC, you can create a virtual network topology—including subnets and route tables—for your EC2 resources. For more information, go to the Amazon VPC product page and the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud User Guide.

Amazon and other reputable sources offer AMIs that you can launch. However, you might want to create your own custom AMIs. You can modify instances of Amazon AMIs or other reputable public AMIs as needed and create your own custom AMIs from them. For general information about AMIs, go to AMIs and to Creating Your Own AMIs in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

You can choose between Amazon S3 or Amazon Elastic Block Store as the root device for your AMI (for a brief description of Amazon EBS, see Amazon Elastic Block Store later in this section). We recommend using instances backed by Amazon EBS, because they launch faster and use persistent storage. For more information, go to AMIs Backed by Amazon EBS in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

You can import a virtual machine or volume from your own data center into Amazon EC2. For more information, go to Importing Your Virtual Machines and Volumes into Amazon EC2 in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

To meet the needs of different organizations and applications, Amazon EC2 instances are available in different sizes and CPU/memory configurations. For more information, go to Instances in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

You can add optional metadata to your instances, AMIs, and other EC2 resources to help you categorize and manage them. For more information, go to Using Tags in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

You might want to have static IP addresses for your instances. Amazon EC2 provides elastic IP addresses that can be dynamically remapped to different instances. For more information, go to Elastic IP Addresses in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

You might be concerned about keeping others from accessing your instances, both inside and outside the Amazon network. You can create other security groups (beyond the basic group we used in this guide) to meet your security requirements. For more information, go to Network Security Concepts in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

You might want to build a geographically dispersed, fault tolerant architecture on Amazon EC2. You can place instances in different geographic regions and isolate instances within those regions using Availability Zones. This provides geographic flexibility and affordable fault tolerance. For more information, go to Region and Availability Zone Concepts in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

AWS provides Amazon Linux AMIs, which are supported and maintained Linux images optimized for the EC2 environment. For more information, go to Amazon Linux AMI.

Amazon EC2 can run Microsoft Windows Server, with or without Microsoft SQL Server. For more information, go to the Amazon EC2 Running Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server page. Also, go to Instance Families and Types and look for Windows Instance Types in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

You might want to run a set of full-time or nearly full-time instances but also bring down your costs. Amazon EC2 supports an additional pricing option that enables you to make a low one-time payment for each instance to reserve and receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance. For more information, go to On-Demand and Reserved Instances and to Reserving Amazon EC2 Instances in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

If you're flexible about when you need instances and want to bring down your costs, Amazon EC2 lets you bid for unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run your instances for as long as your bid exceeds the current Spot Price. For more information, go to the Amazon EC2 Spot Instances product page and Introduction to Spot Instances.

You might need more space than is provided on the instance, or you might need a permanent storage solution. Amazon Elastic Block Store enables you to create volumes that can be mounted as block devices by Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes behave like raw unformatted external block devices, and they persist past the life of an Amazon EC2 instance. For more information, go to the Amazon Elastic Block Store product page. Also go to Amazon Elastic Block Store in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

You might need a solution for monitoring your instances. Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for Amazon EC2 that is designed to gather, aggregate, store, and retrieve metrics. For more information, go to the Amazon CloudWatch product page and the Amazon CloudWatch Developer Guide.

You might need a solution for load balancing requests to your instances. Elastic Load Balancing offers the ability to evenly spread requests across your running Amazon EC2 instances. For more information, go to the Elastic Load Balancing product page and the Elastic Load Balancing Developer Guide.

You might want to automatically scale up and down the number of instances you use. Auto Scaling enables you to automatically increase or decrease the number of running Amazon EC2 instances in response to your web application’s usage and the configuration you define. For more information, go to the Auto Scaling product page and the Amazon Auto Scaling Developer Guide.

Amazon EC2 offers micro instances, which provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to burst CPU capacity when additional cycles are available. They are well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that consume significant compute cycles periodically. For more information, go to Micro Instance Concepts in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

Amazon EC2 offers cluster instances for your High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications. These instances provide you with high-bandwidth, low-latency inter-node communications for advanced computational applications such as computational fluid dynamics, computational biology, and materials research. For more information, go to Using Cluster Instances in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

Amazon EC2 provides a repository of public data sets, such as the mapping of the human genome and the US census data, that you can seamlessly integrate into your AWS cloud-based applications. For more information, go to the Public Data Sets on AWS page. Also go to Using Public Data Sets in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.