Elastic Web-Scale Computing
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. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.
Completely Controlled
You have complete control
of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. You can stop your instance while retaining the data on your boot partition and then subsequently restart the same instance using web service APIs. Instances can be rebooted remotely using web service APIs. You also have access to console output of your instances.
Flexible Cloud Hosting Services
You have the choice of multiple
instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application. For example, your choice of operating systems includes numerous Linux distributions, and Microsoft Windows Server.
Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services
Amazon EC2 works in
conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service [Amazon S3], Amazon Relational Database Service [Amazon RDS] and Amazon Simple Queue Service [Amazon SQS] to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.
Reliable
Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and
datacenters.
Secure
Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your compute resources. Your compute instances are located in a Virtual Private Cloud [VPC] with an IP range that you specify. You decide which instances are exposed to the Internet and which remain private.
- Security Groups and networks ACLs allow you to control inbound and outbound network access to and from your instances.
- You can provision your EC2 resources as Dedicated Instances. Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 Instances that run on hardware dedicated to a single customer for additional isolation.
- If you do not have a default VPC you must create a VPC and launch instances into that VPC to leverage advanced networking features such as private subnets, outbound security group filtering, network ACLs and Dedicated Instances.
Inexpensive
Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume.
On-Demand Instances
On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs. On-Demand Instances also remove the need to buy “safety net” capacity to handle periodic traffic spikes.
Reserved Instances
Reserved Instances provide you with a significant discount compared to On-Demand Instance pricing. There are three Reserved Instance payment options [No Upfront, Partial Upfront, All Upfront] that enable you to balance the amount you pay upfront with your effective hourly price.
Spot Instances
Spot instances are spare compute capacity in the Amazon Web Services cloud available to you at steep discounts compared to On-Demand prices. EC2 Spot enables you to optimize your costs on the Amazon Web Services cloud and scale your application's throughput up to 10X for the same budget. By simply selecting Spot when launching EC2 instances, you can save up-to 90% on On-Demand prices.
Dedicated Hosts
An Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you address compliance requirements and reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses including Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or other software licenses that are bound to VMs, sockets, or physical cores, subject to your license terms.
Easy to Start
Quickly get started with Amazon EC2 by visiting the Amazon Web Services Management Console to choose preconfigured software on Amazon Machine Images [AMIs]. You can quickly deploy this software to EC2 via the EC2 console.