Best practices for Amazon EC2 - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Best practices for Amazon EC2

To ensure the maximum benefit from Amazon EC2, we recommend that you perform the following best practices.

Security

  • Manage access to AWS resources and APIs using identity federation with an identity provider and IAM roles whenever possible. For more information, see Creating IAM policies in the IAM User Guide.

  • Implement the least permissive rules for your security group.

  • Regularly patch, update, and secure the operating system and applications on your instance. For more information, see Update management. For guidelines specific to Windows operating systems, see Security best practices for Windows instances.

  • Use Amazon Inspector to automatically discover and scan Amazon EC2 instances for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. For more information, see the Amazon Inspector User Guide.

  • Use AWS Security Hub controls to monitor your Amazon EC2 resources against security best practices and security standards. For more information about using Security Hub, see Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud controls in the AWS Security Hub User Guide.

Storage

  • Understand the implications of the root device type for data persistence, backup, and recovery. For more information, see Root device type.

  • Use separate Amazon EBS volumes for the operating system versus your data. Ensure that the volume with your data persists after instance termination. For more information, see Preserve data when an instance is terminated.

  • Use the instance store available for your instance to store temporary data. Remember that the data stored in instance store is deleted when you stop, hibernate, or terminate your instance. If you use instance store for database storage, ensure that you have a cluster with a replication factor that ensures fault tolerance.

  • Encrypt EBS volumes and snapshots. For more information, see Amazon EBS encryption in the Amazon EBS User Guide.

Resource management

  • Use instance metadata and custom resource tags to track and identify your AWS resources. For more information, see Use instance metadata to manage your EC2 instance and Tag your Amazon EC2 resources.

  • View your current limits for Amazon EC2. Plan to request any limit increases in advance of the time that you'll need them. For more information, see Amazon EC2 service quotas.

  • Use AWS Trusted Advisor to inspect your AWS environment, and then make recommendations when opportunities exist to save money, improve system availability and performance, or help close security gaps. For more information, see AWS Trusted Advisor in the AWS Support User Guide.

Backup and recovery

  • Regularly back up your EBS volumes using Amazon EBS snapshots, and create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from your instance to save the configuration as a template for launching future instances. For more information about AWS services that help achieve this use case, see AWS Backup and Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager.

  • Deploy critical components of your application across multiple Availability Zones, and replicate your data appropriately.

  • Design your applications to handle dynamic IP addressing when your instance restarts. For more information, see Amazon EC2 instance IP addressing.

  • Monitor and respond to events. For more information, see Monitor Amazon EC2 resources.

  • Ensure that you are prepared to handle failover. For a basic solution, you can manually attach a network interface or Elastic IP address to a replacement instance. For more information, see Elastic network interfaces. For an automated solution, you can use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling. For more information, see the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling User Guide.

  • Regularly test the process of recovering your instances and Amazon EBS volumes to ensure data and services are restored successfully.

Networking

  • Set the time-to-live (TTL) value for your applications to 255, for IPv4 and IPv6. If you use a smaller value, there is a risk that the TTL will expire while application traffic is in transit, causing reachability issues for your instances.