Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

What Does Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Mean?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a cloud infrastructure offered under Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides raw computing resources on demand.

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Amazon EC2 provides computing instances that can be scalable in terms of computing power and memory, flexible by providing the option to host applications on multiple different platforms, and secure thanks to a tightly coupled multi-tenant architecture. Amazon EC2 enables the provision of a virtual server, which can incorporate massive amounts of computing power. This is available on a subscription-based utility computing model, and the user is billed only for the resources used.

Amazon EC2 is also known as Amazon Web Services EC2 (AWS EC2).

Techopedia Explains Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a pioneer cloud infrastructure product that allows users to create powerful virtual servers on demand. Amazon EC2 is hosted on the server consolidation/virtualization concept, where the entire computing power of server hardware can be divided into multiple instances and offered to the end-user over the Internet as a computing instance.

Because the computing instances provided are software based, each unique instance is scalable and users can create an entire virtual data center over the cloud. Amazon EC2-created instances can be accessed by open-source Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) application programming interface (API) support, giving developers the liberty to create various types of applications, just as with an on-premises computing infrastructure. The instance provided by EC2, commonly known as a virtual machine, is created using Amazon Virtual Image and is hosted over Xen Hypervisor, a server virtualizing software.

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Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…