This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by AKASH S
First Things First — What’s EC2?
So basically, EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud.
Now, if someone coming from using physical machines or on-premise servers, here's the shift — instead of maintaining those heavy, costly, and fixed systems, we now use virtual servers in the cloud. These are much more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective.
EC2 is just AWS’s version of this virtual computer.
We can launch it anytime, choose our operating system, configure its specs, and access it from anywhere — all through the internet. And not just AWS, almost every cloud provider offers a similar service with different names.
Here’s what I learned as I explored EC2. These are not definitions, just what I personally understood through hands-on work:
1. Name of the Machine
When we launch an instance, give it a proper name — something like akash-dev-machine
2. AMI (Amazon Machine Image)
- Think of this like the OS setup file (kind of like an ISO file). AWS already gives us pre-configured images.
- We just choose what we need:
- Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, Windows, etc.
- It’s up to our project.
3. Instance Type
Now this is where I got a bit confused at first, but here's how I made sense of it:
- General Purpose → Balanced CPU and RAM (1:1 ratio)
- Compute Optimized → More CPU-heavy stuff (2:1 ratio)
- Memory Optimized → Big data and memory-based tasks (1:2)
- Storage Optimized → Better for IOPS and file-heavy operations
- Accelerated Computing → GPU instances for ML, video rendering, etc.
- HPC → High-performance computing stuff
As we're on Free Tier (like me when I started), we mostly use t2.micro or t3.micro.
4. Key Pair (Very Important)
This part is all about secure login.
- we’ll create a key pair during EC2 launch.
- AWS stores the public key in the EC2 instance.
- Download the private key (the .pem file).
- It’s kind of like a door lock 🔒 and our own key 🔑. we need this .pem file every time we want to SSH or RDP into the machine.
5. Security Groups
This is like your instance’s firewall.
Here, we define:
- What ports should be open,
- Who can access them,
- From which IPs.
Some common ports:
- 22 → SSH (Linux)
- 3389 → RDP (Windows)
- 80 → HTTP (Web traffic)
- 443 → HTTPS
Real-World Example
Let’s say we have:
- One EC2 for our website (public).
- One EC2 for our admin panel (private). For the public one, allow traffic from anywhere (0.0.0.0/0). For the admin one, allow only our IP. That way, it's secure.
6. Hosting Webpages on EC2
On Windows:
- Use IIS (Internet Information Services).
- Our default folder will be something like: C:\inetpub\wwwroot
- Paste our HTML files there and access via EC2 IP in a browser.
On Linux:
- we’ll need to install and start the HTTP server (Apache).
- Paste our HTML files into /var/www/html/.
- Open the IP in a browser and — it works.
7. Transferring Files Between Local and EC2
If wou want to share files:
- Use WinSCP
- Just paste our EC2’s public IP, choose our key file, and we're in.
- It’s super handy for moving project files, images, and logs.
Wrapping Up
- This is not some “tutorial” post.
- I just wanted to put down everything I actually understood after playing around with EC2 for weeks.
- From launching an instance, accessing it, setting up networking and security — all of it made me feel like, “Yeah, I’m finally getting how the cloud works.”
- If you're starting with AWS, start with EC2. It’s your foundation for understanding other services.
🌐 More on the way. Keep an eye out!
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by AKASH S
AKASH S | Sciencx (2025-07-16T18:35:24+00:00) 🖥️What EC2 Means to Me — A Beginner’s Honest Breakdown. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/07/16/%f0%9f%96%a5%ef%b8%8fwhat-ec2-means-to-me-a-beginners-honest-breakdown/
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