EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a core service of Amazon Web Services that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It allows users to run virtual servers, called instances, on demand. Instances can run Linux, Windows, or other operating systems and are available in several families to suit different workloads. EC2 was launched in 2006 as part of AWS.

Pricing models include On-Demand instances with pay-as-you-go pricing, Reserved Instances and Savings Plans for longer commitments, and Spot Instances that use unused capacity at discounts. Auto Scaling can adjust capacity automatically in response to demand. EC2 uses Elastic Block Store (EBS) for persistent storage, while instance storage provides temporary data.

Underlying technology includes the Nitro hypervisor, which provides virtualization and isolation for instances. Instance families cover general purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, storage-optimized, and accelerated computing, with sizes ranging from small to very large. Customers choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to boot the instance.

Networking and security are provided through Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), subnets, and route tables. Security groups act as virtual firewalls; IAM roles and policies control permissions for applications running on instances. Elastic Load Balancing distributes traffic, and Auto Scaling manages health checks and restarts.

EC2 operates in numerous regions worldwide, each containing multiple Availability Zones to improve fault tolerance. Features such as EBS encryption and IAM-based access control support data protection and governance. Monitoring is integrated via CloudWatch, and management is available through APIs and SDKs.

Common use cases include web hosting, batch processing, data analytics, high-performance computing, and machine learning workloads. EC2 enables scalable, decoupled compute for applications of varying size and latency requirements.