The most popular and central component of AWS is the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The EC2 provides on-demand scalable computing infrastructure to developers through virtual machines. This means that a developer can spin up a virtual machine with customized specs in a choice of geographical locations to run their application.

The service is elastic, meaning a developer has the option to scale up or down their infrastructure as required for operations and pay by the minute for active servers only. The developer can set the geographical location to reduce latency and achieve a high level of redundancy. 

This chapter focuses on creating an Amazon EC2 instance, setting up a VPC around the instance, and configuring the firewall to restrict remote access to this VPC. 

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• How to run setup customized EC2 instances with the available AMI
• Storage types that are used for EC2 instances 
• Firewall and VPC configuration
• Authentication mechanism