What is Amazon EC2

EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud (Infrastructure as a Service)

It provides cloud hosted virtual machines, called "instances", to run applications

It mainly consists in the capability of :

  • Renting virtual machines (EC2)
  • Storing data on virtual drives (EBS)
  • Distributing load across machines (ELB)
  • Scaling the services using an auto-scaling group (ASG)

It is one of the most popular of AWS’ offering