EC2 & AWS: Powering business in the cloud

Agility and efficiency are the key to success in the business world. In this journey towards innovation, migration to the cloud is an essential step. In that regard, at the heart of Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the leading cloud platforms on the market, we have Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

It is nothing less than the keystone for taking your business to a new level. EC2 is a cloud computing service from AWS. It provides scalable processing power and allows you to launch and manage virtual instances on the AWS infrastructure. Simply put, it gives you the flexibility, scalability and efficiency to achieve your cloud goals.

Benefits of migrating to AWS with EC2

• Unlimited scalability: allows you to scale vertically or horizontally, adapting to the fluctuations in the workload. When a sudden increase in demand happens (or an abrupt decrease), it allows you to easily adjust the computing capacity. For horizontal scaling, it allows the configuration of Auto Scaling Groups (ASG). Through the definition of scaling policies, it automatically adjusts the number of running instances to meet the demand of an application. Thus, it maintains the balance between capacity and availability. Policies can be armed for automatic scaling based on demand or using cloudwatch metrics such as CPU usage.

• Instance flexibility: offers customizable options for different workloads, from general-purpose to CPU, GPU or storage optimized instances. Allows selection of the optimal configuration to maximize performance. In addition, a wide range of different processor architectures are available to support EC2. Among them, those based on the ARM architecture (Graviton), which tend to be more energy efficient than x86. This results in lower operating costs and a smaller carbon footprint for cloud workloads.

• Pay-as-you-go model: eliminates the need for upfront hardware investments. You pay only for resources used, which is more cost-effective and enables more efficient financial management. Besides, it offers diverse fee models depending on the needs of the user:

1. On-demand instances. Short workload, predictable pricing, pay per second.
2. Reserved Instances (1 and 3 years). They can be reserved instances (for long workloads) or convertible reserved instances (for long workloads with flexible instances).
3. Savings plans (1 and 3 years). Dedicated to a quantity of use, long workloads.
4. Spot instances. Short workloads, inexpensive, but can be required by AWS at any time.
5. Dedicated Hosts. Reserve an entire physical server, control the location of instances.
6. Dedicated instances. No other customer will share your hardware.
7. Capacity reservations. Reserve capacity on a specific AZ for any duration.

• Global availability and high resiliency: AWS guarantees continuous availability of your applications. EC2 enables the implementation of scalable resilient architectures by distributing instances across different availability zones, ensuring service continuity.

• Automation and orchestration: the EC2’s integration with services such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS CloudFormation, simplifies application management and deployment by automating and orchestrating resources.

• Machine image management (AMI) and security: allows you to create and manage AMIs. It thus facilitates the standardization of application environments. In addition, AWS provides tools such as IAM and VPC to ensure the security of instances.

• Monitoring and analytics: Services such as Amazon CloudWatch provide detailed performance monitoring of EC2 instances and allow you to set alarms and optimize resources.

Success story with EC2 on AWS

A company with an on-premise web application was experiencing performance issues at certain times due to significant fluctuations in user demand, which affected the user experience. In order to solve this, that company started looking for an alternative with a cost-optimized approach.

Other challenges included adapting to diverse workloads efficiently and cost-effectively, and ensuring application security and availability on a global scale.

How did they solve it? By migrating the backend layer to the AWS cloud and adopting EC2 as the backend compute instance of their application.

Step-by-step implementation:

1. ASG configuration with the following escalation policies:

• Scheduled: as the customer had identified the constant peak usage days and times, it was decided to increase the number of instances available depending on the day and time.
• Dynamic: A second policy was programmed by CPU usage monitoring, which allowed to increase the number of available instances if the CPU average is higher than 50%.

In both cases, the number of minimum and maximum instances was defined based on stress tests with data provided by the client.

2. Configuration of Application Load Balancer (ALB); to distribute the traffic among the different instances of the scaling group. This ensures a better distribution of the workload among the different instances and high availability of the service.

During the analysis and survey phase, it was identified that the application was compatible with browsers based on ARM architectures. This made it possible to deploy this type of instance. After validating the viability of using this type of architecture, a Graviton CPU was implemented, achieving the expected performance.

As the demand peaks and the minimum required instances were known, a 3-year commitment was established with AWS for reserved instances. It was recommended to the customer to evaluate the use of capacity reservations to ensure the availability of on-demand instances when the ASG required scaling.

As a result, the company significantly improved application performance. There were no performance issues at peak times. In addition, the implementation of ASG and ALB was simple and flexible enough to adapt the architecture to future requirements. Finally, it was suggested to the client to implement predictive scaling policies to better adapt to possible fluctuations or changes in application demand.

Conclusion

Migrating to AWS with EC2 is not just a technology transition, but a comprehensive strategy to drive innovation and efficiency in your business. From unlimited scalability to advanced security, every feature of EC2 builds a platform that drives growth and sustainable success. The combination of EC2’s versatility and AWS’s global infrastructure meets your current demands and prepares the path for you to grow without limits.

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