EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud

• For creating an EC2 instance: you need to choose an AMI ((Amazon Machine Image) an Operating System for your instance). Then, define the Instance Size (which kind of CPU and how much RAM). Then, how much Storage (pretty self explanatory) you want and then Security Groups (like almost a firewall, so from which ports can people connect with or which ports can data leave from the EC2 instance). You can also define the EC2 user data (a bootstrap script which launches at the first start of an instance).

• There are ways to connect to your EC2 instance directly, such as SSH (Secure Shell) so you can connect to your EC2 instance with SSH in a terminal form, you can also connect with a SSH client like PuTTY. I prefer the EC2 Instance Connect though as it's just browser-based, simple and just a good feature by AWS.

• EC2 Instance Roles are just defined permissions attached to an EC2 instance to allow it to do certain things, so then you can use AWS commands in the CLI to perform AWS functions.