Cisco Cisco Workload Automation 6.3 User Guide

Introducing the Amazon EC2 Adapter

Instance Storage



 – Provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allows applications to increase CPU 

capacity in short bursts when additional cycles are available.

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 – Offer large memory sizes for high throughput applications, including database and 

memory caching applications.



 – Has more CPU capacity then memory and well suited for compute-intensive instances.



 – Provides proportionally high CPU resources with increased network performance 

and are well suited for High Performance Compute (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound 
applications.



 – Provide general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs) with proportionally high CPU 

and increased network performance for applications benefitting from highly parallelized processing, including HPC, 
rendering and media processing applications. 

Instance Storage

There are two types of instance storage:



 – keeps the instance boot partition on a temporary store that is destroyed when the instance 

lifecycle ends.



 – keeps the instance's boot partition on an EBS volume and can be persisted beyond the lifecycle of 

the instance. 

Amazon Machine Image (AMI)

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are VM images from which instances are launched. They can be installed with a number 
of popular operating systems and applications. EC2 has a large number of existing AMIs to choose from. Or, customers 
can create their own AMIs from a VM image they upload themselves into EC2.

Regions and Availability Zones

Amazon segments cloud infrastructure into regions and availability zones. Regions are segmented geographically. There 
are major regions for both coasts of the United States for example. Regions are further segmented into availability zones. 
Each availability zone is a logically distinct “data center” that is insulated from other availability zones. By keeping 
instances in separate availability zones, customers can protect their applications from failures in other zones. EC2 
provides inexpensive, low latency network connectivity between availability zones in the same region.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is one of the persistent storage types for EC2. The other is Amazon Simple Storage 
Service (S3). EBS stores or volumes act as raw unformatted external hard drives that can be formatted using a file system 
such as ext3 (Linux) or NTFS (Windows) and mounted on an EC2 instance.

If an EBS volume is used as the boot partition of an instance, that instance can be stopped and restarted. In contrast, 
instances cannot be restarted after being stopped if their boot partition is stored in instance storage.

Snapshots can be created of EBS volumes and backed up into S3. These snapshots can be restored back into an EBS 
volume at any time.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

S3 is the other persistent storage type for EC2. It provides a simple web service interface that customers use to store 
and retrieve any amount of data. Like a file system, S3 data is conceptualized into buckets (folders) and objects (files).