Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It lets you launch virtual servers (called "instances") in minutes and scale capacity up or down as your needs change.

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What Is an EC2 Instance?

An EC2 instance is a virtual server running in AWS. You choose:

• The instance type (CPU, memory, storage, network capacity)
• The Amazon Machine Image (AMI) — the operating system and pre-installed software
• The storage — EBS volumes or instance store
• The network configuration — VPC, subnet, security groups
• The key pair — for SSH access (Linux) or password retrieval (Windows)

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Instance Types

AWS offers a wide variety of instance types optimised for different use cases: