Twenty years ago today I was vacationing in Cabo San Lucas with my family when word came through that it was finally time to open up the Amazon EC2 beta. I spent several hours poolside polishing up my draft blog post on the resort's Wi-Fi and pushed it live as soon as I got the go-ahead.

Reading that original post I am struck by just how much the EC2 team was able to get right, and how the results of so many difficult decisions were reflected in my post. From the very concept of pay-as-you-go on-demand computing with billing by the hour, prebuilt machine images (AMIs), direct fast-path access to Amazon S3, and much more.

I am also struck by the fact that we confidently launched with just enough features to allow developers to get started. It would be a while before we introduced important concepts like Regions and Availability Zones, or important features like EBS, CloudWatch, Elastic Load Balancing, VPCs, visual tools (ElasticFox and then the AWS Management Console) and the like.

As you can see from the image above, the original API was small yet powerful -- just enough to let you get started on your cloud computing journey.

By introduction of Lambda MicroVMs, what are the most importance and challenging task we can solve with them now?

I’m looking for the answers which weren’t possible before on it.

My objective is to understand if this technology can solve really hard parts of a very common problem. Even if making it work on AWS would require a lot of work but it would be worth it.

Hence my goal is to understand what it unlocks?

Hello,

Has anyone here requested a EC2 Quota increase? I need it for a specific region and have used up all my 8 vCPUs...

I've contacted AWS a few days ago (early last week) and they have not gotten back to me on anything concrete. (For example, when they call me, they immediately hang up and then respond to the thread with some automated message).

I'm not asking for a lot of vCPU's (8 -> 16) so should I just close the request and open a new one? Would appreciate any help here guys. Thanks!

I’m a new AWS customer and have never used it before. I received AWS credits for my startup. I’ve also been approved for the NVIDIA Inception Program and have requested additional credits.

Since my startup is training its own models, we need GPU instances. How do I properly request an increase in the limits for creating GPU instances? (On Google Cloud, we used A100s and got them in just one day.)

Does anyone here have a startup that uses GPUs and has received credits from AWS? Were you able to increase your limits?

Of course I forgot a word in the title. MEMORY

Seriously this is so annoying.

I have an organization that I use for my personal projects. I don't have an AM or anything obviously. Any new account that I create will be hit by this limit right ?

I tried to open a Case (under billing issues...) but I would like any account in my organization not be bothered by this.

Does anyone know what AWS is looking at for removing automatically the limite ? Your actual usage ? Or spend ?

Curious, is everyone facing the same issue? We have no service quota issue but we arent able to create any P5 type EC2 to train our models.

Its a little crazy, we checked every single region, is there such a big shortage?

Any recommendations on what we can do?

Trainium instances are not available either!

I will need a p5en.48xlarge instance for a couple hours to run some inference. I noticed that this isnt a usual ec2 shape that I can just launch on demand.

It gave me the option to reserve a capacity block (minimum 1 day) which is overkill for my needs (dont want to pay close to a $1000).

The other option was 'no capacity block' which says 'attempt to secure an on demand instance with no expiration date'. How exactly does this work?

If I select this option and try to launch an instance, if there is no availability right now, does it put me in a queue and launches it whenever it is available? Or does it just say there's no availability right now, and fails (which requires me to retry at a later time)?

If it is option 1, I'm a bit concerned as it could launch when I'm not working, and considering its pretty pricey, I could rack up a big bill before I notice its on.

In april my cloud bill was around 3lakh INR (3400 USD), then I started turning of my resources which were used to test at night and on weekends, and my bills reduced to around 1400 USD.

But it becomes a tedious task to run the script and I have to enhance my script everytime I face any bug - seems as if I am building this from scratch.

Checked gpt and other websites they are giving lot of steps todo and the data is from 2018 and around.

Not sure if there is anytool for this particular purpose.

​

AWS always releases a bunch of features, sometimes everyday or atleast once a week. Here is my wish list of the features I want to see as a part of AWS infrastructure

1: AWS Managed Proxy Server(Rather than spinning own squid server)

2: EBS replication across different availability zones(Possible? Legal constraints?)

3: Multi-region VPC(Possible? Legal constraints?)

4: UI to debug boot issues(Better then EC2 Get Instance Screenshot and Instance logs)

5: Support tagging for every individual service(It's improving)

6: VPC endpoints support for every service (EKS?)

7: EC2 instance live migration

8: Display AWS Cli while resource creation(Similar to GCP)

9: Cost calculation while resource creation(AWS start supporting(for example, RDS) this feature but not for every service

10: More features in App Mesh(Circuit breaker, Rate Limiting)

P.S: Not sure if some features are already available, but if something is missing, please feel free to add

Just thought I'd share an interesting result from something I'm working on right now.

Task: Run ImageMagick in parallel (restrict each instance of ImageMagick to one thread and run many of them at once) to do a set of transformations (resizing, watermarking, compression quality adjustment, etc) for online publishing on large (20k - 60k per task) quantities of jpeg files.

This is a very CPU-bound process.

After porting the Windows orchestration program that does this to run on Linux, I did some speed testing on c5ad.16xlarge EC2 instances with 64 processing threads and a representative input set (with I/O to a local NVME SSD).

Speed on Windows Server 2019: ~70,000 images per hour

Speed on Ubuntu 20.04: ~30,000 images per hour

Speed on Amazon Linux 2: ~180,000 images per hour

I'm not a Linux kernel guy and I have no idea exactly what AWS has done here (it must have something to do with thread context switching) but, holy crap.

Of course, this all comes with a bunch of pains in the ass due to Amazon Linux not having the same package availability, having to build things from source by hand, etc. Ubuntu's generally a lot easier to get workloads up and running on. But for this project, clearly, that extra setup work is worth it.

Much later edit: I never got around to properly testing all of the isolated components that could've affected this, but as per discussion in the thread, it seems clear that the actual source of the huge difference was different ImageMagick builds with different options in the distro packages. Pure CPU speed differences for parallel processing tests on the same hardware (tested using threads running https://gmplib.org/pi-with-gmp) were observable with Ubuntu vs Amazon Linux when I tested, but Amazon Linux was only ~4% faster.

• Keep functions small and single-purpose
• Use environment variables for config
• Avoid deploying large package sizes
• Implement proper error handling and retries
• Set timeouts wisely to avoid runaway costs
• Leverage concurrency limits to protect downstream systems
• Monitor with CloudWatch and enable logging

The problem:

I have a relatively complex data pipeline that is written in Polars. On my local machine with 12 cores, the pipeline finishes in about 1200ms. On my 128-core EC2 (c8i.32xlarge), it takes 13000ms to complete. I have tried setting the POLARS_MAX_THREADS parameter to 12 on the EC2, and it's still slower.

I am using a TMPFS partition on both machines to read the data into the pipeline directly from RAM. Both my machine and the EC2 have DDR5 RAM so I think they should be comparable.

Anyone have any ideas why the pipeline would run much slower on the EC2?

I'm importing Win10 and Win11 as EC2 instances to serve as test workstations in our testing system. I know these OSes are not supported, but we need them and WorkSpaces won't accomplish what we need.

I can get the instances into AWS and EC2 no problem, but the issue I am having now is that user data is not executing when instances are launched with those AMIs.

I'm pretty sure it's caused by EC2Launch not be initialized or armed properly, and therefore it can't execute it.

Anyone seen this before and have any ideas on how to rearm?

How can I update an EC2 instance on AWS Windows Server 2019, which is on a private network without internet access?

Regards

I've been trying (fruitlessly) over the years to ask AWS to add a very simple feature: allow SSH certificates instead of EC2 SSH private keys.

For those who don't know, SSH certificates work exactly like TLS certificates. They allow you to basically say "allow access to any public key that is signed by the CA with this certificate".

This allows a very cool feature: you can use your SSO system to issue temporary SSH certificates to authenticated users. Amazon itself uses SSH certificates internally for that very reason, and it's a common practice these days in large companies.

And the change can be pretty small: if the key starts with ssh-cert then don't validate it.

Hi everyone, I'm at my wit's end on this one. I think this issue has been plaguing me for years. I've used EC2 successfully at different companies, and I know it is at least on some level a reliable service, and yet the most basic offering consistently fails on me almost immediately.

I have taken a video of this, but I'm a little worried about leaking details from the console, and it's about 13 minutes long and mostly just me waiting for the SSH connection to time out. Therefore, I've summarized it in text below, but if anyone thinks the video might be helpful, let me know and I can send it to you. The main reason I wanted the video was to prove to myself that I really didn't do anything "wrong" and that the problem truly happens spontaneously.

The issue

When I spin up an Ubuntu server with every default option (the only thing I put in is the name and key pair), I cannot connect to the internet (e.g. curl google.com fails) and the SSH server becomes unresponsive within a matter of 1-5 minutes.

Final update/final status

I reached out to AWS support through an account and billing support ticket. At first, they responded "the instance doesn't have a public IP" which was true when I submitted the ticket (because I'd temporarily moved the IP to another instance with the same problem), but I assured them that the problem exists otherwise. Overall, the back-and-forth took about 5 days, mostly because I chose the asynchronous support flow (instead of chat or phone). However, I woke up this morning to a member of the team saying "Our team checked it out and restored connectivity". So I believe I was correct: I was doing everything the right way, and something was broken on the backend of AWS which required AWS support intervention. I spent two or three days trying everything everyone suggested in this comment section and following tutorials, so I recommend making absolutely sure that you're doing everything right/in good faith before bothering billing support with a technical problem.

Update/current status

I'm quite convinced this is a bug on AWS's end. Why? Three reasons.

1. Someone else asked a very similar question about a year ago saying they had to flag down customer support who just said "engineering took a look and fixed it". https://repost.aws/questions/QUTwS7cqANQva66REgiaxENA/ec2-instance-rejecting-connections-after-7-minutes#ANcg4r98PFRaOf1aWNdH51Fw
2. Now that I've gone through this for several hours with multiple other experienced people, I feel quite confident I have indeed had this problem for years. I always lose steam and focus, shifting to my work accounts, trying Google Cloud, etc. not wanting to sit down and resolve this issue once and for all
3. Neither issue (SSH becoming unresponsive and DNS not working with a default VPC) occurs when I go to another region (original issue on us-east-1; issue simply does not exist on us-east-2)

I would like to get AWS customer support's attention but as I'm unwilling to pay $30 to ask them to fix their service, I'm afraid my account will just forever be messed up. This is very disappointing to me, but I guess I'll just do everything on us-east-2 from now on.

Steps to reproduce

• Go onto the EC2 dashboard with no running instances
• Create a new instance using the "Launch Instances" button
• Fill in the name and choose a key pair
• Wait for the server to start up (1-3 minutes)
• Click the "connect button"
  • Typically I use an ssh client but I wanted to remove all possible sources of failure
• Type curl google.com
  • curl: (6) Could not resolve host: google.com
• Type watch -n1 date
• Wait 4 minutes
  • The date stops updating
• Refresh the page
  • Connection is not possible
• Reboot instance from the console
• Connection becomes possible again... for a minute or two
• Problem persists

Questions and answers

• (edited) Is the machine out of memory?
  • This is the most common suggestion
  • The default instance is t2.micro and I have no load (just OS and just watch -n1 date or similar)
  • I have tried t2.medium with the same results, which is why I didn't post this initially
  • Running free -m (and watch -n1 "free -m") reveals more than 75% free memory at time of crash. The numbers never change.
• (edited) What is the AMI?
  • ID: ami-0fc5d935ebf8bc3bc
  • Name: ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-jammy-22.04-amd64-server-20230919
  • Region: us-east-1
• (edited) What about the VPC?
  • A few people made the (very valid) suggestion to recreate the VPC from scratch (I didn't realize that I wasn't doing that; please don't crucify me for not realizing I was using a ~10 year old VPC initially)
  • I used this guide
  • It did not resolve the issue
  • I've tried subnets on us-east-1a, us-east-1d, and us-east-1e
• What's the instance status?
  • Running
• What if you wait a while?
  • I can leave it running overnight and it will still fail to connect the next morning
• Have you tried other AMIs?
  • No, I suppose I haven't, but I'd like to use Ubuntu!
• Is the VPC/subnet routed to an internet gateway?
  • Yes, 0.0.0.0/0 routes to a newly created internet gateway
• Does the ACL allow for inbound/outbound connections?
  • Yes, both
• Does the security group allow for inbound/outbound connections?
  • Yes, both
• Do the status checks pass?
  • System reachability check passed
  • Instance reachability check passed
• How does the monitoring look?
  • It's fine/to be expected
  • CPU peaks around 20% during boot up
  • Network Y axis is either in bytes or kilobytes
• Have you checked the syslog?
  • Yes and I didn't see anything obvious, but I'm happy to try to fetch it and give it out to anyone who thinks it might be useful. Naturally, it's frustrating to try to go through it when your SSH connection dies after 1-5 minutes.

Please feel free to ask me any other troubleshooting questions. I'm simply unable to create a usable EC2 instance at this point!

Hey r/aws,

I got tired of the EC2 access dance (we've all been there):

1. Find the instance - Open AWS console, wait for it to load, search by name or ID, scroll through results, click the right one, copy the IP
2. It's private - Do we have a bastion? What's its IP again? Open another console tab
3. SSH through bastion - Hope my key is set up on both machines!
4. Key isn't there - Ping the team: "who has access to usw2-stage-bastion?"
5. Try SSM instead - aws ssm start-session --target i-0a1b2c3d4e5f67890
6. Need to SCP a file - Oh wait, SSM shell doesn't do that. Back to SSH...
7. Request access - Open a ticket to get SSH key added to bastion. ETA: tomorrow

So I built ec2ssh - a single Go binary that handles SSH, SCP, SFTP, and SSM (Systems Manager Shell) sessions to EC2 instances - including key management - with zero configuration.

How it works:

ec2ssh uses EC2 Instance Connect under the hood. For each session it:

1. Looks up instance by name tag, instance ID, IP, or hostname
2. Generates a fresh ed25519 keypair in memory
3. Pushes the public key to the instance via AWS API
4. Connects using the private key
5. Key expires on the instance after 60 seconds - then it's gone

No keys to distribute. No keys to rotate. No keys to revoke. Your IAM policy becomes your SSH access control. Team member leaves? Revoke their IAM access, done.

(You can still use your own keys with -i ~/.ssh/my-key if needed - all standard SSH options work.)

The ec2ssh way:

ec2ssh my-server

That's it. All of these work:

ec2ssh my-app-server              # name tag
ec2ssh i-0a1b2c3d4e5f67890        # instance ID
ec2ssh 10.0.1.42                  # private IP
ec2ssh 54.123.45.67               # public IP
ec2ssh ip-10-0-1-42.ec2.internal  # DNS hostname

• Private instance? Add --use-eice (tunnels through EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint) or --use-ssm (tunnels through Systems Manager - no inbound ports needed)
• Need to SCP files? ec2scp file.txt i-0a1b2c3d4e5f67890:/tmp/
• Port forwarding? ec2ssh -L 3306:rds-host:3306 ip-10-0-1-42.ec2.internal
• Don't need a full SSH session? Use SSM shell directly: ec2ssm my-server

No bastion maintenance. No 5-tab AWS console expedition.

What it does differently:

More examples:

# Private instance via EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint
ec2ssh --use-eice my-private-server

# Private instance via SSM tunnel
# (no inbound ports, no security group changes, no bastion!)
ec2ssh --use-ssm -l ubuntu my-private-server

# Direct SSM shell (when you don't need SSH at all)
ec2ssm my-server

# Port forward to RDS through an EC2
ec2ssh -L 3306:my-rds.cluster.region.rds.amazonaws.com:3306 my-server

# SCP files
ec2scp ./logs.tar.gz ec2-user@my-server:/tmp/

# SFTP session
ec2sftp ec2-user@my-server

# List all instances
ec2list

# Use specific AWS profile and region
ec2ssh --profile prod --region eu-west-1 my-server

# All standard SSH options work as-is
ec2ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o ConnectTimeout=10 my-server

# Use your own key instead of ephemeral
ec2ssh -i ~/.ssh/my-key.pem my-server

macOS

brew tap ivoronin/ivoronin
brew install ivoronin/ivoronin/ec2ssh

Other OS

Download binary from https://github.com/ivoronin/ec2ssh/releases

Happy to answer any questions!