Amazon EC2 and Auto Scaling for Cloud Engineers
Learn Amazon EC2 from instance types and pricing to launch templates, Auto Scaling Groups, and load balancers, with a lab that scales a real app.
What You'll Learn
Understanding EC2
Almost every other AWS compute service either runs on EC2 or is compared against it, so this is the foundation for the rest of the roadmap.
Choosing Instance Types and Purchasing Options
Picking the wrong instance type wastes money or crashes your app, and picking the wrong purchasing option can double your bill.
Building Launch Templates with AMIs and IMDSv2
A launch template is the recipe for a server. If it is wrong, every instance an Auto Scaling Group creates is wrong too.
Scaling with Auto Scaling Groups
Servers fail and traffic changes. An Auto Scaling Group handles both without anyone being paged.
Routing Traffic with Application Load Balancers
An ASG gives you many servers. A load balancer gives your users one address and keeps them away from the broken ones.
Hands-on Lab: Scale a Real App Behind a Load Balancer
You will build a two-instance web app behind an ALB, prove the load is shared, kill the app to watch recovery, push CPU up to trigger scale-out, and...
Skills You'll Master
Curriculum Index7 topics
Understanding EC2
Almost every other AWS compute service either runs on EC2 or is compared against it, so this is the foundation for the...
Choosing Instance Types and Purchasing Options
Picking the wrong instance type wastes money or crashes your app, and picking the wrong purchasing option can double...
Building Launch Templates with AMIs and IMDSv2
A launch template is the recipe for a server. If it is wrong, every instance an Auto Scaling Group creates is wrong too.
Scaling with Auto Scaling Groups
Servers fail and traffic changes. An Auto Scaling Group handles both without anyone being paged.
Routing Traffic with Application Load Balancers
An ASG gives you many servers. A load balancer gives your users one address and keeps them away from the broken ones.
Hands-on Lab: Scale a Real App Behind a Load Balancer
You will build a two-instance web app behind an ALB, prove the load is shared, kill the app to watch recovery, push CPU...
Quick Reference and Common Mistakes
Quick reference Common mistakes Assuming T3 instances throttle is out of date.
Career Impact
Roles that use the skills in this module.
Cloud Engineer
DevOps Engineer
Solutions Architect
Next Modules
Related Guides
Practice on the Coding Sheet
Not a software engineer sheet. Every problem comes from real DevOps, SRE, Platform and Cloud interviews, from your first script to a system you build yourself.
Open the Coding SheetFrequently Asked Questions
Stopping powers the instance off and keeps its EBS volumes, so you stop paying for compute but still pay for storage. Terminating deletes the instance permanently, and its root volume is deleted by default.
No. AWS Systems Manager Session Manager gives you a shell with no key pair and no open inbound port. Key pairs and SSH remain a fallback.
By default it uses EC2 status checks, which only catch problems with the instance itself. When you use a load balancer, switch to ELB health checks so a crashed application also gets the instance replaced.
Use Spot for workloads that tolerate interruption, such as batch jobs and stateless workers. AWS can reclaim Spot capacity with a two-minute warning, so keep a base of On-Demand capacity for anything that must stay up.