EC2

Last updated: Nov 3, 2026

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Rationale

AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is the service that Fluid Attacks uses to run computing machines in the cloud. It gives the infrastructure for services, for example, the CI and the Kubernetes cluster of Fluid Attacks. These are the primary reasons why Fluid Attacks selected it and not other alternatives:

• It integrates easily with other AWS services that Fluid Attacks uses, for example, EKS, Batch, and Elastic Load Balancing.
• It complies with many certifications from ISO and CSA. Many of these certifications make sure that the entity uses best practices for secure cloud-based environments and information security.
• It gives many machine types, from 2 Vcpus and 0.5 GB RAM to 224 Vcpus and 24,576 GB RAM. Thus, it gives the capability of vertical scaling.
• Machine types also have different specializations. There are general-purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, storage-optimized, and accelerated-computing instances. With all these machine types, Fluid Attacks can easily select the machines that agree with the problem that it must solve.
• It supports Spot Instances. These are unused instances that cost less than the on-demand price. Spot Instances can cost a maximum of 90% less than on-demand instances. AWS can stop Spot Instances when the capacity is not available. Thus, they are very good for tasks that can stop, for example, CI/CD jobs, Batch tasks, and horizontally-scaled applications, for example, the platform of Fluid Attacks.
• It supports Auto Scaling. Thus, Fluid Attacks can automatically increase and decrease the number of machines that run its applications. This is very useful together with the Kubernetes cluster of Fluid Attacks on EKS, because the cluster can start and stop many instances of the ARM with some parameters.
• It supports advanced networking features, for example, public IP addresses, more than one network interface, and connections to virtual private clouds.
• It supports advanced security configurations, for example, security groups that set which ports are accessible, with filters for IP ranges and network protocols, network isolation, and connections to instances with SSH keys.
• It supports many operating systems, for example, the most usual Linux distributions, macOS, Raspbian, and Windows Server. Thus, it is fully flexible for solutions that must use a particular OS.
• It supports Amazon machine images. With these virtualization images, Fluid Attacks can start preconfigured instances without a setup.
• It gives a dynamic resource-limiting approach. Thus, Fluid Attacks has the capability of horizontal scaling. Fluid Attacks can also send quota increase requests.
• Fluid Attacks can easily monitor the instance resources and state with CloudWatch.
• Instances can have external disks with EBS. Thus, the data of an instance continues to be available if the instance stops.

Alternatives

Usage

Fluid Attacks uses AWS EC2 to run these items:

• CI runner managers and autoscaling workers
• Kubernetes cluster workers and autoscaling
• Batch workers
• ERP