AWS Certified Architect: Associate

Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) This is the platform that lets you deploy virtual servers within the AWS environment. The following subsections discuss each one of the elements that make EC2. Amazon Machine Images (AMI's) AMI's are templates of pre-configured EC2 instances. An AMI comprises an operating system, applications and custom configuration. When configuring an EC2 instance selecting your AMI is the first choice you need to make, Amazon offers a lot of AMI configurations but you can also create your own AMIs and reuse them to start you EC2 instances. To create an AMI instance you start with one of the existing Amazon AMIs (you can select one of the AMIs offered directly by Amazon or pick one from the AMI Marketplace ) and create an EC2 instance from it, then you proceed to install your custom applications and configuration to end with a customized EC2 instance which now you can save as an AMI template. You can also create your own AMI from scratch, instead of

This is a list a links that are worth bookmarking or adding to your references since they provide information you may want to use later. CloudPing.info : Pings every one of the AWS regions and prints the latency in ms that it took for each ping to reach the target region. This page should give a general idea about the latency from your location to the different regions but keep in mind that you should run multiple tests and add other considerations before taking a decision based on these results. AWS Simple Monthly Calculator : This web page contains a simple form that you can use to estimate the cost of a configuration involving some (it's not an extensive list of every option) of the basic compute, network and storage options. These are list prices so you may be able to get better prices through your company or individual account. AWS Service Health Dashboard : This dashboard displays the status for every service by region, you can subscribe to specific services if desir

The same availability zones names in different AWS accounts could refer to different data centers, you need to check with AWS to get the right mapping between availability zone and physical data center I was assuming that as long I am paying I shouldn't have constraints to the number of EC2 instances I could start, but it turns out that there are actual hard limits for the different services (not only EC2) and you will need to contact AWS to request a limit increase. This screenshot shows the screen were you can request limit increases for specific EC2 instance types.