EC2 Basics
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>> Welcome back. In this lesson,
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we're going to go ahead and dive into the EC2 basics,
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so let's cover the learning objectives.
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The objectives that we want to basically cover,
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that the ground we want to cover here
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is to define what EC2 is,
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describe how it works,
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and then walk through what you can do with it.
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There's a lot of benefits to it.
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If you can think of everything you
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>> can do with a server,
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>> pretty much you can do everything.
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All of those same things,
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and EC2 as well,
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it's very versatile,
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and it's very convenient.
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EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud.
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So it's more of like an acronym,
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but that's also the name of the service.
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This is a service that delivers
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virtual computing via the Cloud through AWS.
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There are other EC2 equivalents
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for other Cloud environments
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like Azure has virtual machines,
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and I believe Google Cloud has the same as well.
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This is a virtual machine that you can spin up in
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Amazon and use this for all of your server needs.
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Everything you would use a virtual server for,
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you can do that here with an EC2.
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EC2 is very versatile.
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You can install different software on it,
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different operating systems on it.
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You can use it for all different types of purposes,
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they have some EC2s that are intended for graphics,
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so if you do a lot of rendering and editing,
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you can use that, have
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some that are more compute intensive.
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If you do a lot of data analysis,
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you can use those instead.
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This is a infrastructure as
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a service service so this is
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infrastructure, and you can spin it up.
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When we're talking about the different services,
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if we go back to the various service models,
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this falls under the infrastructure as a service
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or the IaaS service model.
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The knowledge on the service
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is going to be very important.
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This is something that you'll
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see quite a few exam questions on this one.
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No telling how many exactly,
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because it definitely varies depending on
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the exam number that you
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get when you sit down to take it.
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But there are going to be
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quite a few exam questions that are going to be asking,
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what it is, what can it do?
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What are the different limitations? Things like that.
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You want to make sure that you're very familiar.
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Ideally that you've hopped into
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the EC2 console and you've
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definitely played around with deploying them,
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terminating them, all that fun stuff.
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You want to really want to make sure that you've been
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using the EC2 service.
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Configuring EC2 instances is very easy.
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You can deploy some of
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the more common operating systems like
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Linux, Windows, and MacOS.
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Yes, macOS, you can actually do that as well.
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There are resource configuration options when you are
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setting up an EC2 instance such as your CPU,
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how big do you want it? How many cores?
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How many cores are there?
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What's the power that you are looking for?
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Again, going back to what's
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the intent of this EC2 instance, what's your use case?
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If you're looking to do something very minor,
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you can deploy an EC2 that
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would be equivalent to the compute
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power of a Raspberry Pi.
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You can do whatever you would want to do on
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a Raspberry Pi in that EC2 instance.
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If you are looking for a massive EC2 instance to do
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something that's very workload intensive,
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they have those options as well,
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and the price varies depending on
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the size of the instance that you're playing with.
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RAM is another configuration option that you can set up.
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You can put as little as one or two gigs,
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and you can ramp that all the way up
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to as many as you want depending on
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the limitations of the type
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or the tier of EC2 that you're deploying.
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We'll get into that a little bit more,
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you'll see what I'm talking about and there's
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some documentation out there to help
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you reference exactly what
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those limitations are depending on the various tiers,
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so you'll get a chance to see that.
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Again, so when you're also
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standing up your EC2 instance,
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you're going to need to define your storage space.
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How many drives do you want?
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What kind of drives do you want?
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Do you want SSDs, do you want hard drives?
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Things like that, you get to
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define the networking environment,
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so is there going to be a public IP?
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Is there going to be an elastic IP like
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a persistence IP address
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that is going to be associated with that EC2 instance,
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which VPC is just going to be in,
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what network is going to be at,
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what subnet is going to be in?
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Those types of things are configuration options
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that you want to make sure that you set up
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when you are configuring the EC2 instance.
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Now, I will quickly note here that some of
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these configuration options can be
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changed even after you've deployed your EC2 instance.
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If you can't for whatever reason, not to worry.
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These are virtual machines.
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It takes only a few minutes for them to spin up.
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If you happen to mess it up,
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you can always start back over.
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Hopefully you have patch groups or you
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have images that you can deploy from.
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But when you do that,
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it's very simple for you to just go ahead and redeploy.
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That being said, you can use bootstrap scripts.
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There is little space and
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the configuration option that allows you to use
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bootstrap scripts so you can just drop it right in there.
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As soon as you spin up the EC2 instance,
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the EC2 instance reads the bootstrap script and begins
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to run the necessary commands that you've defined.
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What is bootstrapping? [LAUGHTER] I
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guess we should talk about that if we're going to be
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discussing the fact that you can actually
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do that when you're standing up an EC2 instance.
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Bootstrapping is basically the startup process in
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which you're setting up
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with the EC2 or with any machine actually.
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It's not just EC2, but maybe you have
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a defined set of rules and things that you
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want to maybe install or you
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want to do very mundane task.
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Like for example, you install
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an operating system and the first thing
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you want to do is run updates.
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This is common practice.
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We want to make sure that we have
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all the latest updates since
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the latest installation that we just put on there.
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If we're installing Linux,
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you typically want to do a pull request to get
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the latest updates and that
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you've upgraded the operating system
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to its latest patches.
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That's something you can define in
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a bootstrap script to do automatically,
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so you don't have to think about that.
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Once everything is done,
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you just log in and you know that you're working with
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the most secure version of your AWS EC2 instance.
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Those are the things that you
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can do with a bootstrap script.
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There's lot of things you can do with that.
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You can install a particular software like Apache,
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or you can define
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certain characteristics onto your EC2 instance.
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This is beyond the scope of this exam.
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You do want to understand
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what bootstrapping is, but beyond that,
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you don't really need to worry about
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all the different things that you can do with it.
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If you're curious, I encourage you to take a look online.
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There's a lot of resources out there to help you.
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But aside from understanding what bootstrapping is,
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I wouldn't worry about it for this test.
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The different types of EC2 instances.
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Here are a few examples.
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Now there are a lot of options out there,
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but some of the more popular ones are your T2 micros,
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your T2 extra-large,
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your C5D for extra large and so forth,
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which is a little bit hard to
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understand the naming convention,
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but as you can see, the virtual CPUs
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associated with them makes sense,
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as you can see, there's a four extra large.
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Well, with that you have 16 virtual CPU cores,
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32 gigs of memory,
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one 400 gig NVMe SSD
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with a network performance of
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up to 10 gigabits per second.
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Pretty healthy size machine.
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That's a pretty beefy one.
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When you compare that to the t2 micro,
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which I would consider more of like
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a Raspberry Pi EC2 instance,
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you can definitely see quite a difference there.
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Cost is going to be very relative to
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the type of machine that you're
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working with and how you're using it,
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so just keep that in mind.
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For everything that we're doing in this course,
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you can definitely use the T2 micro,
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which is free to use.
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But if you start playing with other machines,
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make sure that you turn them off.
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Make sure that you're not using them,
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definitely not for this course
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because you don't need it for this course.
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But if you wanted to play with it for whatever reason,
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that's another option for you as well.
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These are the different instance types there are.
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You may see a question asking you if
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a instance type is
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a real instance type and there's actually
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an acronym out there
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on the internet that you can leverage that'll
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help you to memorize
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the various EC2 instance types there are.
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If you are interested in learning about that,
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I do recommend taking a look at that and
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maybe memorizing that mnemonic to
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help you remember before going into the exam.
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To summarize, we did a brief introduction on EC2,
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so now you know what it is.
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These are virtual machines that are running in AWS Cloud.
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We covered the different configuration options with EC2.
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Now, in a second here you will get a chance to dive into
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this yourself and walk through this process.
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You'll get to actually
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spin up your EC2 instances very easy,
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I promise you, you'll get to watch me
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do it and then you'll do it yourself.
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We also discussed what bootstrapping
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is and how that works,
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what you can do with it and stuff like that.
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Then we also talked about
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the different EC2 instance types
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and some of the resources available to
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you to learn all of them and
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memorize the different EC2 type families,
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which you may see an exam question on or two,
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so be sure to check that out.
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Without further ado, I'll go ahead and let you go here.
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Be sure to grab a cup of coffee,
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because in the next lesson,
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we're going to be doing a walk through.
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You'll get to watch me spin up an EC2 instance.
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Then we're going to follow that up with
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a lab where you will get to do it yourself.
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Be excited, I'm
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excited. I'll see you in the next lesson.
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