Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

The software’s interface allows users to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction while providing them with complete control of their computing resources and lets them run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing customers to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as their computing requirements change.

The program changes the economics of computing by allowing a user to pay only for capacity that they actually use. It enables developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.

Amazon EC2 enables organizations to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. They can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, their application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.Enterprises also have complete control of their instances.

They have root access to each one, and they can interact with them as they would any machine. In addition, they can stop their instance while retaining the data on their boot partition and then subsequently restart the same instance using web service APIs.

The program is designed for use with other Amazon Web services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) so as to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.