Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides on-demand, scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Using Amazon EC2 reduces hardware costs so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. You can add capacity (scale up) to handle compute-heavy tasks, such as monthly or yearly processes, or spikes in website traffic. When usage decreases, you can reduce capacity (scale down) again

The following diagram shows a basic architecture of an Amazon EC2 instance deployed within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). In this example, the EC2 instance is within an Availability Zone in the Region. The EC2 instance is secured with a security group, which is a virtual firewall that controls incoming and outgoing traffic. A private key is stored on the local computer and a public key is stored on the instance. Both keys are specified as a key pair to prove the identity of the user. In this scenario, the instance is backed by an Amazon EBS volume. The VPC communicates with the internet using an internet gateway. For more information about Amazon VPC, see the Amazon VPC User Guide.

Features of Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 provides the following high-level features:Instances

Virtual servers.Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)

Preconfigured templates for your instances that package the components you need for your server (including the operating system and additional software).Instance types

Various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, networking capacity, and graphics hardware for your instances.Key pairs

Secure login information for your instances. AWS stores the public key and you store the private key in a secure place.Instance store volumes

Storage volumes for temporary data that is deleted when you stop, hibernate, or terminate your instance.Amazon EBS volumes

Persistent storage volumes for your data using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).Regions and Zones

Multiple physical locations for your resources, such as instances and Amazon EBS volumes.Security groups

A virtual firewall that allows you to specify the protocols, ports, and source IP ranges that can reach your instances, and the destination IP ranges to which your instances can connect.Elastic IP addresses

Static IPv4 addresses for dynamic cloud computing.Tags

Metadata that you can create and assign to your Amazon EC2 resources.Virtual private clouds (VPCs)

Virtual networks you can create that are logically isolated from the rest of the AWS Cloud. You can optionally connect these virtual networks to your own network.

For details about all of the features of Amazon EC2, see Amazon EC2 features.