EC2

Definition

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is AWS's virtual server service that lets you launch and manage compute instances in the cloud within minutes.

Use Cases

• Airbnb: Web Application Hosting — Runs thousands of EC2 instances to handle booking requests (Processes millions of bookings daily with auto-scaling)

Provider Equivalents

• AWS: EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
• Azure: Virtual Machines
• GCP: Compute Engine
• OCI: Compute Instances

Frequently Asked Questions

What is EC2 used for?

EC2 provides scalable virtual servers for running any application from web servers to machine learning workloads.

How is EC2 priced?

EC2 offers multiple pricing options: On-Demand (pay per hour), Reserved (1-3 year commitment for discounts), and Spot (up to 90% off for flexible workloads).

Category: cloud

Difficulty: basic

Related Terms

• AWS
• Virtual Machine
• VPC
• EBS
• Auto Scaling

See Also

• Cloud Computing
• Cloud Provider
• Lambda
• Azure
• Google Cloud Platform