AWS info introductory guide

update: see Seb Raschka's guide

AWS = "Amazon Web Services", a collection of independent but inter-related services that provide tools for easily handling the infrastructure needs of [typically, but not necessarily] web application development
EC2 = "Elastic Compute Cloud", allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run applications, encouraging scalable deployment through a web service permitting the booting of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. It's called "elastic" as you can create/launch/terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers. Choice of geographical location of the servers allows for latency optimisation and high redundancy. Amazon uses EC2 for its own retail site.
- an EC2 instance has 2 options for storage on its boot disk or "root device":
  1. local 'instance store' (originally the only choice)
  - temporary storage, which survive rebooting an EC2 instance
  - lost when the instance is stopped/terminated (e.g. by an API call, or due to a failure)
  1. Elastic Block Service (EBS) volume
  - provides raw block devices (?)

TBC

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