EC2 Dashboard, States and Description

Understanding EC2 dashboard left Menu

• Once login to the console, Go to EC2 dashboard.
• On EC2 Dashboard, you can see the below details on the left panel.
  • Events – It shows what are the things we did in EC2 Instance.
  • Tags – To represent information about EC2 instances.
  • Reports – A set of reports that shows cost and usage for your usage of EC2.Use these reports to analyze your usage of EC2.
  • Limits – How many instances you are provisioning at any point in time and use up to 20.
  • Images: AMI -Amazon Machine Image-If you want to re-create instances, have to create AMI.
  • Elastic Block Store
  • Snapshot -Image of a volume at a given point in time.
  • Volumes
  • Keypair
  • Security Groups

Different EC2 Instance states

We have different states for EC2 instance, To get the instance states of EC2, go to Actions-> Instance state.

• Start – To start EC2 machine if it is in the stop state, doesn’t work if the instance is running.
• Stop – To stop the running EC2 instance
• Reboot – To restart the instance, it will typically happen in minutes
• Terminate – To completely remove or destroy the instance, it will remove all the resources with respect to EC2.

The two main impacts when you restart instance are:

• Public DNS will be changed – We can overcome these using elastic IPs topic, which will be explained in the next topic.
• Storage – Once you stop and start the instance, all the information in the instance storage will be deleted. So we will be allocating EBS storage for the root file system where all OS related and required software files will be stored.

Describing EC2 Instance

There are two ways to get the description or details of an EC2 instance.

• One is in a Tabular format where you can see the selected instance information in a single row like state, public DNS etc.
• The second one is by selecting a particular single instance, the details will appear at the bottom of Description tab.
• If multiple numbers of Instances are there, we can choose multiple of them, but we cant able to see all the details of instances at a time. So, we have to choose one instance to get the EC2 Instance details.

In the description tab, we can get the following the details

• Unique instance id
• State – running or stopped
• Instance type – E.g.: m4.large
• Elastic IPs
• Availability Zones – In each region, there can be multiple subnets within the data center, called as Availability Zones.
• Security groups- will be generated at the time of instance creation
• AMI ID – Associated AMI ID gets generated from when we procured from Marketplace.
• Keypair Name – keypair associated with the selected instance
• Public DNS – Used to connect instance from remote using ssh, Public DNS is derived from Public IP.
• Private DNS is derived from Private IP. Private DNS will not change and used as a fully qualified hostname.
• VPC ID – Virtual Private Cloud iD, used to create a network of computers.
• The storage information can be seen at Root and device fields and type of the storage. You can click on the storage or volume id to know more about information.

There is much more information about instance which is not at this stage, and all this information will help us to troubleshoot any issues with the server or cluster.