EC2 & Instances - what you are actually renting

The board this lesson explains: an instance, its security group, and the room you are actually renting.

Boards: VMs, Bare Metal & SSH · EC2 & Security Groups Companion: the firewall half of this board is Security Groups vs Network ACLs - this note stays on the instance itself.

Before you start. A virtual machine is a slice of a real computer that answers every command as if it owned the whole thing. This lesson is about how thin that illusion actually is, what happens the moment you forget it is a slice, and nothing more is assumed than that.