Amazon EC2 Policies & Features (Exam Tips)

Quick updates on policies and features that was not discussed in other pages.

Uptime SLA

AWS will use commercially reasonable efforts to make Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS each available with a Monthly Uptime Percentage (defined below) of at least 99.95%.

Licensing Policies

1. You can use new and existing Microsoft software licenses on the AWS Cloud.

   1. By purchasing EC2 or RDS license-included instances, you get new, fully compliant Windows Server and SQL Server licenses from AWS. 

   2. Your existing licenses may be used on AWS with Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts, Amazon EC2 Dedicated Instances, or EC2 instances with default tenancy using Microsoft License Mobility through Software Assurance.

      1. So, by default, a Dedicated Host is required for using your existing Windows Server licenses. 

Amazon Machine Images (AMI)

These are preconfigured templates for your instances ((including the operating system and additional software). There are Amazon provided as well as community AMIs. 

AMIs are a regional resource. Therefore, sharing an AMI makes it available in that region. To make an AMI available in a different region, copy the AMI to the region and then share it. Read more here.

Linux Amazon Machine Images use one of two types of virtualization:

1. paravirtual (PV) or

2. hardware virtual machine (HVM). 

You can use command line parameters to list only the types of AMIs that interest you. For example, you can use the describe-images command as follows to find public AMIs owned by you or Amazon.

Additional Notes (Exam Tips)

1. Amazon will not have root level SSH access to your EC2 instances.