Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

On AWS, virtual machines are offered by the service called Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It’s impressive what you can achieve with the computing power of the smartphone in your pocket or the laptop in your bag. But if your task requires massive computing power or high network traffic, or needs to run reliably 24/7, then AWS platform allows you to effectively rent units of compute power (EC2 instances), storage space (Elastic Block Store [EBS] volumes, which work like a PC’s hard drive), and network connectivity running in AWS’s vast infrastructure.

You can use EC2 resources to run virtual remote machines that can be accessed via the internet. You can install your desired server on these virtual machines and this infrastructure is called as cloud servers.  It is easy for IT or system administrators to manage cloud servers with minimal configuration, rather than handling traditional on-premise servers. Cloud servers are cheap and offer pay-as-you-go pricing models. So, it becomes inexpensive for small as well as large companies. It also offers a variety of operating system flavors to use. So, we can choose whichever operating system is best suited to our requirements or applications.

You don't need to pay any upfront fees for the procurement of Virtual machines. They are charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. We can deploy and run any application on EC2, as it offers a virtual machine. You can create any number of EC2 instances under your account.

Pricing models for EC2instances

On-demand: Amazon charges you based on hours for on-demand instances (only Linux Instances) and no upfront payments are needed. This model is useful for developing/testing application with short-term When you don't know whether you need an instance for a longer time.

Reserved: Reserved instances are 75 % lower cost than on-demand instances. When you want your serves reserved up and running for longer period like 1- or 3-year term then you can pay the upfront fees and purchase the reserved instances with 75% discount.

Spot: When you want to run your instances for few minutes the you can bid for the instances from spare instances in AWS fleet. These types of instances are useful when we want to perform small activities and we are not hampered if the instances are terminated in between activities.

Dedicated: When customers expect their instances to be running in dedicated isolated hardware then customer can select this model. It supports only per-hour billing and does not support per-second billing scheme. Other AWS customer instances are not running on this dedicated host hardware.