aws-basics
𝑬𝑪2 (𝑬𝒍𝒂𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒄 𝑪𝒐𝒎𝒑𝒖𝒕𝒆 𝑪𝒍𝒐𝒖𝒅)
Amazon EC2 is a virtual server that allows you to run applications on the AWS cloud without investing in physical hardware and offers scalable computing capacity.EC2 gives you the control, flexibility, and power to run a website, deploy a machine learning model, or host an enterprise application.
Published on July 13, 2025
Updated on July 13, 2025
What is EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)?
EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud, a service from Amazon Web Services (AWS). EC2 is an on-demand computing service on the AWS cloud platform. It lets you rent virtual computers to run your applications. You pay only for what you use.
Instead of buying and managing your own servers, EC2 gives you a virtual machine, where you can run websites, apps, or even big data tasks. You can choose how much memory, storage, and processing power you need- and stop it when you're done. EC2 offers security, reliability, high performance, and cost-effective infrastructure to meet demanding business needs.
Benefits and features
EC2 offers ultimate scalability and control
Fully resizable compute capacity to support virtually any workload. This service is best if you want:
Highest level of control of the entire technology stack, allowing full integration with all AWS services
Widest variety of server size options
Widest availability of operating systems to choose from including Linux, Windows, and macOS
Global scalability
Key takeaways
EC2 also allows users to build apps to automate scaling according to changing needs and peak periods. It makes deploying virtual servers and managing storage simple, lessening the need to invest in hardware and helping streamline development processes.
EC2 setup involves creating an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which includes an operating system, apps, and configurations.
AWS provides an autoscaling service designed to provide automatic scalability for its various services, including EC2.
Article ID: 6873592a031cb119a29bf009
Slug: elastic-compute-cloud