The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) web service provides you with the ability to execute arbitrary applications in our computing environment.
To use Amazon EC2 you simply:
Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing all your software, including your operating system and associated configuration settings, applications, libraries, etc. Think of this as zipping up the contents of your hard drive. We provide all the necessary tools to create and package your AMI.[1]
Upload this AMI to the Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) service. This gives us reliable, secure access to your AMI.
Register your AMI with Amazon EC2. This allows us to verify that your AMI has been uploaded correctly and to allocate a unique identifier for it.
Use this AMI ID and the Amazon EC2 web service APIs to run, monitor, and terminate as many instances[2] of this AMI as required. Currently, we provide command line tools and Java libraries but you may also directly access our SOAP-based API[3]. In the future we anticipate other interfaces, provided by Amazon EC2 or third-parties and bindings to the web service APIs for other programming languages, including Perl, Python and Ruby.
While instances are running, you are billed for the computing and network resources that they consume.
Note: | Currently Fedora Core 3 and 4 systems based on the Linux 2.6 kernel are explicitly supported, although any Linux distribution which runs on this kernel version should work. |
This guide will refer to the following concepts:
Amazon Machine Image (AMI) - An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is an encrypted file stored in Amazon S3. It contains all the information necessary to boot instances of your software.
Instance - The running system based on an AMI is referred to as an instance. All instances based on the same AMI begin executing identically. Any information on them is lost when the instances are terminated or if they fail.
This guide will walk you through:
Signing up for Amazon EC2 and acquiring the necessary authentication credentials.
Using the command line tools to launch and manage instances.
Creating a new AMI from an existing instance.
[1] You may also build AMIs directly on Amazon EC2 systems, based on previously created images. To help you with this bootstrapping process, we also provide a collection of standard AMIs, which we've already uploaded and registered for you. This makes it possible to skip the first step in this process.
[2] An AMI is unpacked onto a host and booted. Once running, this is referred to as an instance.
[3] Refer to the Amazon EC2 Developer Guide for more detailed information.