Amazon EC2

Definition

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a core AWS service that provides resizable virtual server instances in the cloud, letting users rent compute capacity on demand instead of buying and managing physical hardware.

Overview

EC2 was one of the first services AWS launched, and it established the now-standard cloud computing pattern: instead of provisioning and maintaining physical servers, developers launch virtual machine "instances" from a chosen machine image, pick an instance type sized for their workload's CPU, memory, and networking needs, and pay only for the capacity they use. Instances can be started, stopped, resized, or terminated on demand, and scaled automatically in response to load using EC2 Auto Scaling. EC2 sits underneath much of the rest of AWS's compute ecosystem — managed container services like Amazon EKS ultimately run workloads on EC2 instances (or serverless compute built on the same underlying infrastructure), and databases like Amazon RDS are themselves managed EC2-based deployments under the hood. For many teams, EC2 is the first AWS service they learn, since renting a general-purpose virtual machine maps closely to the on-premises servers it replaced, and it remains the flexible building block for workloads that need full control over the operating system and runtime, as covered in courses like AWS Core Services.

Key Features

• On-demand virtual server instances with resizable compute capacity
• Wide range of instance types optimized for compute, memory, storage, or GPU workloads
• Multiple pricing models: on-demand, reserved, and spot instances
• Auto Scaling to add or remove instances based on demand
• Elastic Block Store (EBS) for persistent, attachable storage volumes
• Security groups and IAM for network and access control
• Wide selection of preconfigured machine images (AMIs)

Use Cases

Frequently Asked Questions

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