Amazon EC2

What is Amazon EC2?

EC2 – Elastic Cloud Compute 2 – is an AWS service which allows customers to deploy and use virtual machines on the cloud. Moving infrastructure to cloud eliminates the usual headaches associated with in-house servers like maintenance and slow scaling, and opens up a world of possibilities. Virtual machines or AMIs (Amazon Machines Images) can be deployed at the push of a button,boast great security, and run your choice of OS and software. Every AMI you deploy is called an instance, and to tackle your issue right, AWS offer five primary classes of instance designed around different needs.  

EC2 Instance Types

  General Purpose instances have a balanced weighting of compute, networking and memory resources. They can be used to handle a broad array of workloads and are preferred by applications, such as web servers, which utilise these three resource types more evenly than most other applications. Compute Optimised instances are designed for applications that are suited to high-performance processors. Compute optimised instances are great for computer intensive applications such as media transcoding, ML and scientific modelling.  Memory Optimised instances deliver high performance for workloads which require the processing of large data sets in memory. Financial services employing real-time processing of unstructured big data would be well served by this class of instance, for example. Accelerate Computing instances make use of hardware-based compute accelerators to carry out high-performance tasks more efficiently than software running CPUs. This instance class is often used to handle floating point number calculations, graphics processing and data pattern matching.  Storage Optimised instances are designed for workloads that demand high, sequential read/write access to very large,  locally stored data sets. They deliver a high volume of I/O operations at low latency.  

Why EC2?

Flexible

There are many variations within each class of instance, and you may deploy as many instances as you can pay for.

Cost-optimised 

EC2 offers varied payment models including an on-demand model, a spare-compute-request model, with large discounts, a reserve model, and a savings model which allows users to obtain discounts by committing to a certain degree of usage. So no matter what your situation, you’ll be able to use EC2 in a cost-effective manner.

An Industry Leader

EC2 boasts high degrees of control and reliability, allowing users to terminate instances via API, and committing to an SLA of 99.99%. All of which makes EC2 a popular choice of prestigious companies the world over, including Netflix, Baidu and ESPN. AWS were the first company to push cloud technology into the spotlight, and they’re still who companies like Azure and Google Cloud Platform look to for innovation. EC2 is constantly evolving and is generally at the forefront of what’s possible in cloud.

Why Just After Midnight?

Great Experience 

As AWS partners, we have the certified resources to advise on and implement any EC2 project. We’ve worked on EC2 projects with brands like DLA Piper, Volvo and Vodafone – where we’ve done everything from supporting the Super Bowl launch of a virtual test-driving smartphone game to ensuring uptime for business-critical marketing assets.

Best-Practice Service 

Committed to providing a best-practice service, we deliver on the core tenets of EC2:

• Security
• Storage 
• Resource Management 
• Back-up and Recovery

Plus, we also observe AWS’s well-architected guidelines, designed to ensure security, performance, resilience and efficiency in AWS infrastructure.

AWS Experts

We’re all-round AWS experts, meaning we can integrate any AWS service into your EC2 project.  We also work with AWS Directory Service, Amazon RDS, Amazon EBS and many, many more. Plus, we’re now AWS DCX Partners too!

Microsoft Integrations 

We understand that many teams want to run Microsoft servers on their AWS set-up, which is why we follow best practices for AWS and Microsoft integration. We work with a wide range of Microsoft services, such as IIS, MSSQL, Active Directory, and more.

A Cloud-Native Support Partner 

We’re more than just a managed cloud provider. We offer truly 24/7 support all year round, and with our offices across the world, we can guarantee you’ll always be connected to a qualified engineer should any issues arise.  Most managed cloud providers are old-guard hosting companies who’ve had to adopt the technology to keep up with the times. We were born in the cloud era, and a commitment to innovation and always-on support are at the heart of who are.

To get in touch about an EC2 project, your AWS cloud requirements or anything else, drop us a message using the form below.