AWS Essentials: Amazon EC2 & VPC Networking for Beginners

Master the essentials of Amazon EC2: launch your first instance, understand VPC networking, connect from terminal or browser, and learn IAM roles, Elastic IPs, AMIs, instance types, and pricing.

Learn how Amazon EC2 lets you launch virtual servers in the cloud using AMI images, attach EBS or instance store volumes, and connect via SSH within a VPC.

Create and attach IAM role for EC2 with a trust policy and AmazonS3ReadOnlyAccess, using an instance profile to grant EC2 access to an S3 bucket for deploying a web page.

Learn to stop, start, and reboot an EC2 instance, understand how root volumes differ between EBS-backed and instance store-backed, and how public DNS, health checks, and costs behave.

Launch a new EC2 instance from a custom AMI to run a preconfigured Nginx web server and serve your web page, configuring VPC settings, security rules, and status checks.

Explore how EC2 instance types determine hardware characteristics and cost per minute, and decode the naming pattern—from family and dot size to generation, options, and GPUs in P-series.

Learn how EC2 capacity reservations secure AZ compute capacity with on-demand options for immediate or future use, and capacity blocks for ML GPU workloads with upfront payment.

Discover core AWS storage for EC2, including EBS volumes and snapshots, encryption of EBS volumes, snapshots, and AMIs, and EFS file storage with mounting and unmounting.

Discover Amazon EBS volume types, from gp3 and gp2 general-purpose SSDs to io1/io2 provisioned IOPS, and HDD options st1 and sc1, with IOPS and throughput explained.

Encrypt AMIs with the same rules as EBS encryption, so encrypted AMIs protect root volumes with a KMS key and can be created, launched, or shared with key control.

Explore Amazon EFS, a serverless elastic file system that scales on demand and enables concurrent file sharing across EC2 instances, container services, Lambda, and on-premises servers.

Differentiate Amazon EFS from Amazon EBS: EBS delivers low-latency block storage for root volumes in one availability zone, while EFS offers scalable network file storage across zones and regions.

Create and attach an EFS file system to an EC2 web server to host a static site, using default encryption and lifecycle policies with per-availability-zone mount targets.

Unmount an EFS from EC2 with sudo umount, verify via df, revert Nginx to the instance volume, restart Nginx, and delete the EFS and its mount targets.

learn how vpc ip addresses and cidr blocks enable internal and internet communication, compare ipv4 and ipv6, and plan primary and secondary cidr ranges with netmask rules.

Create a custom VPC in the AWS VPC console, name it, and assign a 10.0.0/20 CIDR block, then learn to view, manage, and add subnets for EC2 deployments.

Create private subnets in your VPC to ensure no internet access, enabling inner-VPC communication for resources like databases, and plan CIDR blocks with multi-AZ layouts such as 10.0.0.0/24 and 10.0.1.0/24.

Learn how VPC route tables map destinations to targets, including the main route table's local routing, and how custom subnet route tables use an Internet route to the Internet Gateway.

Explore how EC2 instances get private IPs in a VPC by default and public IPs in public subnets, plus the costs of dynamic versus elastic IPs.

Learn to securely connect to private EC2 instances using an EC2 Instance Connect endpoint within a custom VPC, configure private subnets and security groups, and connect over private IP.

Grant outbound internet access from private subnets by provisioning a regional NAT gateway (RNAT), updating a private route table, and testing OpenAI connectivity with curl.

Access AWS services from your VPC with VPC endpoints, keeping traffic on the internal network and using gateway endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB or interface endpoints via PrivateLink for services.

Learn to design scalable EC2 deployments with launch templates, including versioning and modification, implement Elastic Load Balancing, and configure Auto Scaling groups to achieve reliability.

Explore EC2 launch templates as boilerplates that store instance launch parameters for reuse and scaling. Emphasize versioning, immutability, and quick rollback by creating new versions and selecting a default version.

Create an EC2 launch template from scratch to deploy web servers, using an Amazon Linux AMI, a t2.micro instance, security group, public IP, and a user-data script that installs nginx.

Understand that EC2 launch templates are immutable and must be versioned. Create new template versions, adjust the default version, and test deployments with updated user data to verify changes.

Explore how elastic load balancing distributes traffic across EC2 instances in multiple AZs, using listeners and target groups, health checks, auto scaling, and TLS certificates.

Explore AWS elastic load balancer types, including application load balancers for path-based routing and TLS offload, network load balancers for high-speed traffic, and gateway load balancers for security inspections.

Create a target group named 'web-servers-target-group' for EC2 web servers, configure health checks and http port 80, register instances, and adjust deregistration delay before attaching to an application load balancer.

Create an application load balancer in the same VPC as web servers, configure a security group, set an HTTP listener, and route traffic to a target group with health checks.

Create an auto scaling group integrated with an application load balancer using a launch template, target group, and health checks to maintain two web servers.

Learn how auto scaling groups enhance high availability by automatically replacing unhealthy EC2 instances behind a load balancer, with health checks, target groups, and graceful deregistration.

Congratulations on finishing the AWS Essentials course on Amazon EC2 and VPC basics, the foundation for many AWS services; continue exploring the cloud and DevOps concepts with my other courses.