Security is one of the highest priorities for Amazon Web Services. The service provider provides all-inclusive security for the workloads. AWS aims at providing security for users’ data, inspect the security activities, and receive responses. AWS has many applications dedicated to providing security to its users. EC2, which stands for Elastic Computing Cloud, is among the top entries of the list of such applications. EC2 allows the users to create and deploy applications on their computers, with flexible capacity requirements and minimal or no hardware restrictions.
EC is a component of Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enables its users to hire virtual systems for the sake of operating them in the form of virtual private servers. These virtual private servers are much better than the physical servers in several disciplines. They are more cost-effective as well as their boot time is very less. Also, here, you are not supposed to purchase, configure and install physical servers on your own. Apart from these, virtual private servers can run their own operating systems, that come with built-in enterprise-level security services, and complete access and control to the users of those computers. Irrespective of the size of the business, EC2 is a wise choice for everyone because of its flexible processing capability. With EC, one can manage the computer instances that enable the users with the ability to scale-up or scale-down boot instances. They can also decide the number of steps to set up professor settings. The virtual private servers, the ones that you create with EC, can be managed through an API (Application Program Interface). To use this API, an SDK (Software Development Kit) can be downloaded from the AWS.
What is EC2?
Elastic Compute Cloud is one of the leading cloud services offered by Amazon Web Services. EC2 offers scalable computing by the facility of renting virtual servers to run users’ applications. EC2 works with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Book Storage (EBS) for data storage, Amazon Elastic MapReduce for processing data, and Amazon CloudFront for distribution of content on the internet.
The virtual machines – instances are to be created and Amazon Machine Images (AMI) are to be booted to use EC2. An instance contains all the software requirements – operating system, applications, configuration settings, etc. The server instance can be created, launched, and terminated as and when required. The term ‘elastic’ is used here because the charges are applied to each instance based o the number of hours it was running.
Let us look at the benefits of Amazon EC2 Security.
- Elastic Load Balancing is one of the most important advantages of EC Security. As there are multiple instances, the incoming traffic can be distributed among them and so, the load can be balanced. Moreover, this load balancing will let it identify the instances that are not working properly and need repairing. The traffic can be re-routed to healthy instances and -the one found to be unhealthy can be mended. The overall performance of the application can be further improved by balancing the load across multiple zones and not just the Availability Zone.
- The Auto Scaling feature is the next advantage that attracts people to use EC2. According to the conditions defined by the clients, EC2 capacity will be scaled. Auto Scaling coordinates with the number of active instances in use automatically to provide an efficient performance even when demand surges or lulls.
- Thanks to EC2 that users have complete control over where their data will be stored. Users can also set access controls for other people who would deal with this data. This access controls and refined identity, if added with timely inspection, will ensure that the resources are not used inappropriately.
- Users have the facility to combine their projects with the Amazon EC2 applications to smooth the progress of workflow management and streamline the functions and conformity operations.
- The security tasks can be automated using EC2 and human interaction can be eliminated. As we all know, human beings are prone to commit errors, but by using this, the mistakes in configurations can be abolished. The company’s personnel can get more time and they can focus on other vital requirements of the application under development. Also, the security of information stored on the cloud increases exponentially because of this.
- EC2 provides several security solutions that can be used directly and they automate everything. So, the team whose only task, earlier, was to ensure security, can, now, focus on other important tasks such as building, installing and deploying secure codes.
- Moreover, the users also get this benefit of automating their infrastructure and tools that monitor security. This will strengthen their security and reliance control systems for confidentiality, integrity, and availability purposes.
- When launched for the first time, EC2 lets you decide the OS of your choice. This feature is very beneficial for those who have just shifted to using cloud services. This feature has created a space of interoperability. The applications which are already built on the Windows platform and so are the databases, and storage techniques, are not required to change their architecture. These applications, when deployed on the cloud, can still be used by systems running on different operating systems. The flexibility in choosing the operating system has made EC2 easy to use.
- EC has many features that enable built-in security. Users have the full control of who has what kind of control over which instance. Security groups can be formed and access control rights can be assigned to each of these groups by the users themselves. Moreover, these rules can be modified at any time. It provides both – security of the cloud and security in the cloud.
- EC2 provides a high-performance, failure-resilient, feature-rich, and robust environment for many business needs. The elastic IP and other features of EC2 make it one of the strongest cloud-based infrastructure options.
- EC2 has a large ecosystem of security partners and solutions.
Amazon EC2 is created to provide the clients with an opportunity to create applications that are secure, scalable, high-performing, and interoperable. Most of your security problems will be solved automatically y just choosing EC2 for your project as the EC services have their main aim of offering security solutions that suit optimally in every scenario.