AWS’s popular compute platform called “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud” (commonly known as Amazon EC2) offers over 500 instances, – allowing your choice of a variety of processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model configurations.
This article provides a general overview. In later articles, we will provide topic specific deep dives, and also cover similar topics with Microsoft’s Azure compute platform and Google’s GCP platform.
As a basic reminder, it’s worth to highlight that an instance is a virtual machine. A virtual machine needs underlying infrastructure to run, – which can be configured in many ways. An AWS Instance is therefore a virtual machine on the AWS platform you can use to run cloud-based applications, which can have various configurations.
Configurations exist to allow you to fine tune the Instance to your workload.