This chapter covers some of the fundamental building blocks of the computing category of AWS cloud services. It's hard to accomplish much in the cloud without computing resources, which gives you a place to run your code. The most common computing resource is a virtual server, and you will get a thorough introduction to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in this chapter. However, server-less environments are becoming more and more prevalent, so you will also have the opportunity to create and configure an AWS Lambda function.

Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) is by far the most utilized service in the AWS catalog, and it comes with a very rich and deep set of functionality. More than just virtual machines, EC2 provides a framework of sub-services to help you secure and manage your instances elastically, such as Elastic Load Balancing, Autoscaling, Security Groups, and Elastic Block Store.

AWS Systems Manager offers a consolidated view of large numbers of resources, such as EC2 instances, and gives administrators ways to automate things such as deploying security patches in a consistent manner.

AWS Lambda is quickly becoming the glue that holds together many architectures, and it can completely replace your EC2 instances if you embrace the serverless mindset.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Creating a key pair
• Launching an instance
• Attaching storage
• Autoscaling an application server
• Creating security groups
• Creating a load balancer
• Using AWS Systems Manager to log in to instances from the console
• Creating serverless functions with AWS Lambda