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).

EC2 in Cloud Architecture

Understanding EC2 is important for cloud practitioners. Cloud architects encounter this concept when designing systems for reliability, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

In cloud Cloud, EC2 is one of several foundational concepts that practitioners must master to design production-ready systems. Related concepts in the same domain include the terms listed in the See Also section below.

Canvas Cloud AI provides an AI-powered designer for cloud architecture diagrams where practitioners can visualise how EC2 fits into a broader system. Users describe their architecture in plain English and receive a diagram, Terraform export, and Learning Guide — all without leaving the browser.

Category: cloud

Difficulty: basic

Related Terms

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

See Also

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