Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a fundamental Amazon Web Services (AWS) offering that provides scalable virtual computing capacity in the cloud. It allows users to rent virtual servers, known as instances, on demand, enabling them to run any application they need without upfront hardware…

Key facts

First appeared: 2006
Category: technology
Problem solved: The high cost, slow provisioning, and inflexibility of traditional on-premise IT infrastructure, which required significant upfront capital expenditure and long lead times for server procurement and setup, leading to either over-provisioning or under-provisioning of resources.
Platforms: macOS (EC2 Mac instances), Windows Server, Bare Metal, Linux (various distributions)

Related technologies

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service)
AWS Load Balancer (ELB/ALB/NLB)
Docker
Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store)
Kubernetes (EKS)
Chef/Puppet/Ansible
AWS Auto Scaling
IAM (Identity and Access Management)
CloudWatch

Notable users

Capital One
GE
Toyota
Samsung
Spotify
Netflix
Airbnb
Pinterest
Dropbox