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AMIs and Instance Types

Let's talk a bit more about the choices we made when launching that EC2 instance.

We chose the "Amazon Linux" AMI (Amazon Machine Image) to boot our virtual machine. This contains the baseline software for the server. Most AMIs just include an operating system like Ubuntu Linux or Windows Server 20XX, while others include full software stacks from a vendor.

You can also make your own AMIs, which is helpful if you're going to be repeating the same configuration over and over again (we'll talk about autoscaling later) or moving a server to a different region. It's a full VM image, not just a container (like Docker)!

We then chose an instance type to use. This just defines what hardware resources are attached to our server. Think CPU, memory, GPU, the type of processor/networking card, etc.

Ours is a fairly small machine, t3.micro (~$7.60/month). There are also huge gold-plated servers with lasers like u7in-32tb.224xlarge (~$263,520/month). (Okay, it doesn't actually have gold plates or lasers... but for that price maybe it should.)