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Hectal
Phase 2Intermediate3 of 9 in AWS

Compute — EC2, Scaling & Load Balancing

Virtual servers, how to reach them safely, how to run many of them that heal themselves, and how traffic gets spread across them.

EC2 is the oldest and most fundamental AWS service — even when you later use containers or Lambda, there is EC2 (or something shaped exactly like it) underneath. This phase covers launching instances properly, controlling network access to them, replacing hand-managed servers with Auto Scaling groups, and putting a load balancer in front so users never see an individual instance fail.

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4 topics ~53 min 9 code blocks & diagrams
Start with the first topic
1
2.1

EC2 Fundamentals: Instance Types, AMIs & User Data

An EC2 instance is a virtual machine built from an AMI (the disk image), sized by an instance type (CPU/memory/network), and configured at first boot by a user-data script.

13 min 2 code practice

2
2.2

Security Groups, Key Pairs & Session Manager

Security groups are stateful, allow-only firewalls attached to each instance; SSH key pairs are the traditional way in, and Systems Manager Session Manager is the modern way that needs no open port and no keys at all.

13 min 1 diagram 2 code practice

3
2.3

Launch Templates & Auto Scaling Groups

A launch template describes how to build one instance; an Auto Scaling group keeps the right number of those instances running across AZs, replaces unhealthy ones, and adds or removes capacity as load changes.

13 min 1 diagram 1 code practice

4
2.4

Elastic Load Balancing: ALB vs NLB

An Application Load Balancer routes HTTP(S) requests by host, path, and headers; a Network Load Balancer forwards raw TCP/UDP at very high throughput with static IPs — and both only send traffic to targets that pass health checks.

14 min 1 diagram 1 code practice