What is Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2 is short for: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

Amazon EC2 provides cloud hosted virtual machines, called "instances", to run applications.

Amazon EC2 Introduction Video

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What is Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2 is a cloud computing platform that can be auto-scaled to to meet demand.

Different hardware and software configurations can be selected. Different geographical locations can be selected be closer to users, as well as providing redundancy in case of failures.

Persistent storage can be provided by Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage). Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) data can also be accessed with Amazon EC2 instances, and is free if they are in the same region.

Amazon EC2 Pricing

Amazon EC2 instances are priced per second according to five different options:

• On-demand
• Spot instances (discounted short-term capacity if available)
• Savings Plans (commitment to a certain amount of usage)
• Reserved Instances (discounted reserved long-term capacity)
• Dedicated Hosts (on-demand hourly or by reserved instances)