What is Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2 is stands for: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

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

Simple term EC2 is called as "virtual server".

What is Amazon EC2?

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.

An EC2 instance is a virtual server in the AWS Cloud. When you launch an EC2 instance, the instance type that you specify determines the hardware available to your instance. Each instance type offers a different balance of compute, memory, network, and storage resources. 

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).

You can deploy your applications in EC2 servers without any worrying about the underlying infrastructure. You configure the EC2-Instance in a very secure manner by using the VPC, Subnets, and Security groups. You can scale the configuration of the EC2 instance you have configured based on the demand of the application by attaching the autoscaling group to the EC2 instance. You can scale up and scale down the instance based on the incoming traffic of the application.

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.

Amazon EBS volumes

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

Instance store volumes

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

Key pairs

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

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.

Service to use with Amazon EC2:  Amazon Auto Scaling, AWS Backup, Amazon Cloud Watch, Amazon Load Balancing, Amazon GuardDuty,EC2 Image Builder, AWS System Manager. 

    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)