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AWS EC2, Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling: Core Compute Concepts Explained

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Amazon EC2 is AWS's Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering that lets users launch and manage virtual machine instances in the cloud, with full control over the operating system, software, and security. Key building blocks include Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) as launch templates, instance types defining CPU and memory, key pairs for secure access, and security groups acting as virtual firewalls. Elastic Load Balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple EC2 instances, while Auto Scaling automatically adjusts the number of running instances in response to real-time demand — a concept known as elasticity or horizontal scaling. In contrast, scalability refers to resizing a single instance vertically by changing its instance type, which requires stopping the instance and is considered a long-term capacity decision. Together, ELB and Auto Scaling form the foundation of resilient, cost-efficient application architecture on AWS.

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