If you don’t have an AWS account, it is free to sign up. New accounts get several services for free, but with some restrictions. See the free tier page for more information. Since most of the tutorials in this documentation are not computationally expensive, it would be safe to use the ‘free tier’ of instances that AWS provides for new users.
The main AWS resource that Essentia uses are the EC2 instances. These virtual machines act as master and worker nodes in an Essentia cluster, and supply the computing and memory required for processing data. First time users are strongly encouraged to read the excellent documentation provided by Amazon.
Just as vital is the S3 data storage resource. By providing highly redundant data storage in the cloud, Essentia is able to effectively process large volumes of data without being I/O bound.
Although AWS related operations can be performed with the Web-based GUI the AWS Console provides, we encourage our users to download and use the AWS Command Line Interface.