Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate them from common failure scenarios.
EC2 features include:
&bull Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds, or even thousands of server instances simultaneously.
&bull Capacity – Amazon EC2 provides a wide selection of instance types with varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity that you can use to meet the unique needs of your applications.
&bull Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You can interact with your instances using an interactive console, or you can use any SSH client. You can stop and start your instances at will, and terminate them when you no longer need them. You can also attach or detach elastic storage volumes as your needs change.
&bull Secure – You can launch your instances in a virtual private cloud (VPC) to isolated them from the rest of the Internet. You can control who has access to your instances using security groups and network access control lists.
&bull Flexible – You can choose to launch your instances on either a Windows or a Linux operating system.
&bull Resilient – Amazon EC2 provides you with the ability to launch instances across multiple Availability Zones within a Region, allowing you to protect your applications from localized failures.
