Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable, secure, and scalable compute capacity in the cloud, allowing users to rent virtual servers (instances) on-demand. Launched as a foundational service of Amazon Web Services (AWS), it enables running applications…

Key facts

First appeared: 2006
Category: technology
Problem solved: EC2 solved the problem of rigid, expensive, and slow-provisioning physical server infrastructure by providing on-demand, scalable virtual compute capacity, eliminating the need for companies to purchase and manage hardware upfront[1][3].
Platforms: FreeBSD, AWS Graviton (Arm), Windows, AWS Nitro System, Linux

Related technologies

Amazon S3
Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
EBS
Auto Scaling
Amazon VPC

Notable users

Airbnb
Expedia
NASA
Capital One
Netflix