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. You can also use Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to maintain availability of your EC2 fleet and automatically scale your fleet up and down depending on its needs in order to maximize performance and minimize cost. To scale multiple services, you can use AWS Auto Scaling.

You have complete control of your instances including root access and the ability to interact with them as you would any machine. You can stop any instance while retaining the data on the boot partition, and then subsequently restart the same instance using web service APIs. Instances can be rebooted remotely using web service APIs, and you also have access to their console output.

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, choice of operating systems includes numerous Linux distributions and Microsoft Windows Server.

Amazon EC2 is integrated with most AWS services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to provide a complete, secure solution for computing, query processing, and cloud storage across a wide range of applications.

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 data centers. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.99% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.

Cloud security at AWS is the highest priority. As an AWS customer, you will benefit from a data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations. Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your compute resources.

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. See Amazon EC2 Instance Purchasing Options for more details.

There are several ways to get started with Amazon EC2. You can use the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Tools (CLI), or AWS SDKs. AWS is free to get started. To learn more, please visit our tutorials.