Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that
provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed
to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain
and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you
with complete control of your computing resources and lets you
run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces
the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to
minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and
down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes
the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for
capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers
the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate
themselves from common failure scenarios.
Easy to sign up, pay only for what you use
This page contains the following categories of information. Click to jump down:
Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to launch instances with a variety of operating systems, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.
To use Amazon EC2, you simply:
Select a pre-configured, templated image to get up and running immediately. Or create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data, and associated configuration settings.
Configure security and network access on your Amazon EC2 instance.
Choose which instance type(s) and operating system you want, then start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs or the variety of management tools provided.
Determine whether you want to run in multiple locations, utilize static IP endpoints, or attach persistent block storage to your instances.
Pay only for the resources that you actually consume, like instance-hours or data transfer.
Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.
Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. You can stop your instance while retaining the data on your boot partition and then subsequently restart the same instance using web service APIs. Instances can be rebooted remotely using web service APIs. You also have access to console output of your instances.
Flexible – You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application. For example, your choice of operating systems includes numerous Linux distributions, and Microsoft Windows Server.
Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.
Reliable – Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.
Secure – Amazon EC2 provides numerous mechanisms for securing your compute resources.
Amazon EC2 includes web service interfaces to configure firewall settings that control network access to and between groups of instances.
When launching Amazon EC2 resources within Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), you can isolate your compute instances by specifying the IP range you wish to use, and connect to your existing IT infrastructure using industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN. You can also choose to launch Dedicated Instances into your VPC. Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 Instances that run on hardware dedicated to a single customer for additional isolation.
Inexpensive – Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume. See Amazon EC2 Instance Purchasing Options for a more detailed description.
On-Demand Instances – On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs. On-Demand Instances also remove the need to buy “safety net” capacity to handle periodic traffic spikes.
Reserved Instances – Reserved Instances give you the option to make a low, one-time
payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly charge for that instance. There are three Reserved Instance types (Light, Medium, and Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances) that enable you to balance the amount you pay upfront with your effective hourly price.
Spot Instances – Spot Instances allow customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price. The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids meet or exceed it gain access to the available Spot Instances. If you have flexibility in when your applications can run, Spot Instances can significantly lower your Amazon EC2 costs. See here for more details on Spot Instances.
Features
Amazon EC2 provides a number of powerful features for building scalable, failure resilient, enterprise class applications, including:
Amazon Elastic Block Store – Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) offers persistent storage for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes provide off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of an instance. Amazon EBS volumes are highly available, highly reliable volumes that can be leveraged as an Amazon EC2 instance’s boot partition or attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance as a standard block device. When used as a boot partition, Amazon EC2 instances can be stopped and subsequently restarted, enabling you to only pay for the storage resources used while maintaining your instance’s state. Amazon EBS volumes offer greatly improved durability over local Amazon EC2 instance stores, as Amazon EBS volumes are automatically replicated on the backend (in a single Availability Zone). For those wanting even more durability, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time consistent snapshots of your volumes that are then stored in Amazon S3, and automatically replicated across multiple Availability Zones. These snapshots can be used as the starting point for new Amazon EBS volumes, and can protect your data for long term durability. You can also easily share these snapshots with co-workers and other AWS developers. See Amazon Elastic Block Store for more details on this feature.
Multiple Locations – Amazon EC2 provides the ability to place instances in multiple locations. Amazon EC2 locations are composed of Regions and Availability Zones. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones, are geographically dispersed, and will be in separate geographic areas or countries. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region. Amazon EC2 is currently available in eight regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), South America (Sao Paulo), and AWS GovCloud.
Elastic IP Addresses – Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing. An Elastic IP address is associated with your account not a particular instance, and you control that address until you choose to explicitly release it. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, Elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or Availability Zone failures by programmatically remapping your public IP addresses to any instance in your account. Rather than waiting on a data technician to reconfigure or replace your host, or waiting for DNS to propagate to all of your customers, Amazon EC2 enables you to engineer around problems with your instance or software by quickly remapping your Elastic IP address to a replacement instance. In addition, you can optionally configure the reverse DNS record of any of your Elastic IP addresses by filling out this form.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud – Amazon VPC is a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud. Amazon VPC enables enterprises to connect their existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend their existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include their AWS resources. See Amazon Virtual Private Cloud for more details.
Amazon CloudWatch – Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources and applications, starting with Amazon EC2. It provides you with visibility into resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patterns—including metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. You can get statistics, view graphs, and set alarms for your metric data. To use Amazon CloudWatch, simply select the Amazon EC2 instances that you’d like to monitor. You can also supply your own business or application metric data. Amazon CloudWatch will begin aggregating and storing monitoring data that can be accessed using web service APIs or Command Line Tools. See Amazon CloudWatch for more details.
Auto Scaling – Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using scales up seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and available at no additional charge beyond Amazon CloudWatch fees. See Auto Scaling for more details.
Elastic Load Balancing – Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve even greater fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the amount of load balancing capacity needed in response to incoming application traffic. Elastic Load Balancing detects unhealthy instances within a pool and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. You can enable Elastic Load Balancing within a single Availability Zone or across multiple zones for even more consistent application performance. Amazon CloudWatch can be used to capture a specific Elastic Load Balancer’s operational metrics, such as request count and request latency, at no additional cost beyond Elastic Load Balancing fees. See Elastic Load Balancing for more details.
High Performance Computing (HPC) Clusters – Customers with complex computational workloads such as tightly coupled parallel processes, or with applications sensitive to network performance, can achieve the same high compute and network performance provided by custom-built infrastructure while benefiting from the elasticity, flexibility and cost advantages of Amazon EC2. Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU Instances have been specifically engineered to provide high-performance network capability and can be programmatically launched into clusters – allowing applications to get the low-latency network performance required for tightly coupled, node-to-node communication. Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU Instances also provide significantly increased network throughput making them well suited for customer applications that need to perform network-intensive operations. Learn more about Cluster Compute and Cluster GPU Instances as well as other AWS services that can be used for HPC Applications.
VM Import – VM Import enables you to easily import virtual machine images from your existing environment to Amazon EC2 instances. VM Import allows you to leverage your existing investments in the virtual machines that you have built to meet your IT security, configuration management, and compliance requirements by seamlessly bringing those virtual machines into Amazon EC2 as ready-to-use instances. This offering is available at no additional charge beyond standard usage charges for Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. Learn more about VM Import.
Instances of this family are well suited for most applications.
Small Instance (Default) 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit platform
Large Instance 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
Extra Large Instance 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
Micro Instances
Micro instances (t1.micro) provide a small amount of consistent CPU resources and allow you to increase CPU capacity in short bursts when additional cycles are available. They are well suited for lower throughput applications and web sites that require additional compute cycles periodically. You can learn more about how you can use Micro instances and appropriate applications in the Amazon EC2 documentation
.
Micro Instance 613 MB of memory, up to 2 ECUs (for short periodic bursts), EBS storage only, 32-bit or 64-bit platform
High-Memory Instances
Instances of this family offer large memory sizes for high throughput applications, including database and memory caching applications.
High-Memory Extra Large Instance 17.1 GB memory, 6.5 ECU (2 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 420 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance 34.2 GB of memory, 13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance 68.4 GB of memory, 26 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
High-CPU Instances
Instances of this family have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and are well suited for compute-intensive applications.
High-CPU Medium Instance 1.7 GB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 350 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit platform
High-CPU Extra Large Instance 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform
Cluster Compute Instances
Instances of this family provide proportionally high CPU resources with increased network performance and are well suited for High Performance Compute (HPC) applications and other demanding network-bound applications. You can learn more about Cluster instance concepts by reading the Amazon EC2 documentation. For more information about specific use cases and cluster management options for HPC, please visit the HPC solutions page.
Cluster Compute Quadruple Extra Large 23 GB memory, 33.5 EC2 Compute Units, 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform, 10 Gigabit Ethernet
Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large 60.5 GB memory, 88 EC2 Compute Units, 3370 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform, 10 Gigabit Ethernet
Cluster GPU Instances
Instances of this family provide general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs) with proportionally high CPU and increased network performance for applications benefitting from highly parallelized processing, including HPC, rendering and media processing applications. While Cluster Compute Instances provide the ability to create clusters of instances connected by a low latency, high throughput network, Cluster GPU Instances provide an additional option for applications that can benefit from the efficiency gains of the parallel computing power of GPUs over what can be achieved with traditional processors. Learn more about use of this instance type for HPC applications.
Cluster GPU Quadruple Extra Large 22 GB memory, 33.5 EC2 Compute Units, 2 x NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs, 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform, 10 Gigabit Ethernet
EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) – One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.
See Amazon EC2 Instance Types for a more detailed description of the differences between the available instance types, as well as a complete description of an EC2 Compute Unit.
Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are preconfigured with an ever-growing list of operating systems. We work with our partners and community to provide you with the most choice possible. You are also empowered to use our bundling tools to upload your own operating systems. The operating systems currently available to use with your Amazon EC2 instances include:
Amazon EC2 enables our partners and customers to build and customize Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with software based on your needs. We have hundreds of free and paid AMIs available for you to use. A small sampling of the software available for use today within Amazon EC2 includes:
Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. Estimate your
monthly bill using AWS
Simple Monthly Calculator. The prices listed are based on the
Region in which your instance is running. For a detailed comparison
between On-Demand Instances, Reserved Instances and Spot Instances,
see Amazon EC2 Instance Purchasing
Options.
Free Tier*
As part of AWS’s Free Usage
Tier, new AWS customers can get started with Amazon EC2 for
free. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive the following EC2
services each month for one year:
750 hours of EC2 running Linux/Unix Micro instance usage
750 hours of EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server Micro instance usage
750 hours of Elastic Load Balancing plus 15 GB data processing
30 GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) plus 2 million IOs and 1 GB snapshot storage
15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services
1 GB of Regional Data Transfer
On-Demand Instances
On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour
with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and
complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and
transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller
variable costs.
Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance, from the
time an instance is launched until it is terminated. Each partial
instance-hour consumed will be billed as a full hour.
Reserved Instances
Reserved Instances give you the option to make a low, one-time
payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a
significant discount on the hourly charge for that instance. There are three Reserved Instance types (Light, Medium, and Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances) that enable you to balance the amount you pay upfront with your effective hourly price.
Reserved Instances can be purchased for 1 or 3 year terms, and the
one-time fee per instance is non-refundable. Light and Medium Utilization Reserved Instances also are billed by the instance-hour for the time that
instances are in a running state; if you do not run the instance in
an hour, there is zero usage charge. Partial instance-hours consumed
are billed as full hours. Heavy Utilization Reserved Instances are billed for every hour during the entire Reserved Instance term (which means you’re charged the hourly fee regardless of whether any usage has occurred during an hour).
If Microsoft chooses to increase the license fees that it charges
for Windows, we may correspondingly increase the per-hour usage rate
for previously purchased Reserved Instances with Windows. The
initial one-time payment for a Reserved Instance will be unaffected
in this situation. Any such changes would be made between Dec 1 –
Jan 31, and with at least 30 days’ notice. If the per-hour usage
rate does increase, you may continue to use your Reserved Instance
with Windows with the new per-hour usage rate, convert your Reserved
Instance with Windows to a Reserved Instance with Linux, or request
a pro rata refund of the upfront fee you paid for the Reserved
Instance with Windows.
Reserved Instances are available for Linux/UNIX, Windows and SUSE
Linux Enterprise operating systems. You can also optionally reserve
instances in Amazon VPC at the same prices as shown
above. Click here to learn
more about Reserved Instances.
Spot Instances
Spot Instances enable you to bid for unused Amazon EC2 capacity.
Instances are charged the Spot Price, which is set by Amazon EC2 and
fluctuates periodically depending on the supply of and demand for Spot
Instance capacity. To use Spot Instances, you place a Spot Instance
request, specifying the instance type, the Availability Zone desired, the number
of Spot Instances you want to run, and the maximum price you are
willing to pay per instance hour. To determine how that maximum price
compares to past Spot Prices, the Spot Price history is available via
the Amazon EC2 API and the AWS Management Console. If your maximum
price bid exceeds the current Spot Price, your request is fulfilled
and your instances will run until either you choose to terminate them
or the Spot Price increases above your maximum price (whichever is
sooner).
Click here to learn more about
Spot Instances. For information on how to get
started, click
here.
The following table displays the Lowest Spot Price per Region and instance
type (updated every 5 minutes). In addition to Linux/Unix and
Windows, we also offer Spot Instances for Amazon EC2
running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
If you would like to go straight to a view of the latest Spot Instance pricing:
Log in to the AWS Management Console, then click the “Amazon EC2” tab.
Click on “Spot Requests” in the navigation pane on the left.
Click on “Pricing History” to open a view of pricing selectable by instance type.
Data Transfer**
Internet Data Transfer
The pricing below is based on data transferred "in" and
"out" of Amazon EC2.
There is no Data Transfer charge between Amazon EC2 and other
Amazon Web Services within the same region (i.e. between
Amazon EC2 US West and Amazon S3 in US West). Data transferred
between Amazon EC2 instances located in different Availability
Zones in the same Region will be charged Regional Data
Transfer. Data transferred between AWS services in different
regions will be charged as Internet Data Transfer on both
sides of the transfer.
Usage for other Amazon Web Services is billed separately from
Amazon EC2.
Availability Zone Data Transfer
$0.00 per GB
– all data transferred between instances in the same
Availability Zone using private IP addresses.
Regional Data Transfer
– all data
transferred between instances in different
Availability Zones in the same region.
Public and Elastic IP and Elastic Load Balancing Data Transfer
– If you choose
to communicate using your Public or Elastic IP address or
Elastic Load Balancer inside of the Amazon EC2 network,
you’ll pay Regional Data Transfer rates even if the
instances are in the same Availability Zone. For data
transfer within the same Availability Zone, you can easily
avoid this charge (and get better network performance) by
using your private IP whenever possible.
Amazon Elastic Block Store
Elastic IP Addresses
Amazon CloudWatch
Detailed Monitoring for Amazon EC2 is charged at standard Amazon CloudWatch rates of $0.50 per metric per month. Each instance includes seven metrics for total charges of $3.50 per month. Partial months are charged on an hourly pro rata basis, at approximately $0.005/instance-hour.
Note: This new pricing for Detailed Monitoring (representing a 68% decrease from the current price) takes effect starting June 1, 2011. Prior to that, the price remains $0.015 per instance-hour or partial hour. Pricing for Amazon CloudWatch Custom Metrics takes effect starting June 1, 2011. Custom metrics (that you send and Amazon CloudWatch monitors) before that time are free of charge.
Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and carries no
additional fees. Each instance launched by Auto Scaling is
automatically enabled for monitoring and the
applicable Amazon Cloudwatch charges will
be applied.
Elastic Load Balancing
AWS GovCloud Region
AWS GovCloud is an AWS Region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. For pricing and more information on the new AWS GovCloud Region, please visit the AWS GovCloud Web Page.
* Your usage for the free tier is calculated each month across all regions except the AWS GovCloud Region, and automatically applied to your bill – unused monthly usage will not roll over. Does not include Amazon EC2 running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Amazon EC2 running IBM, and the AWS GovCloud Region. See offer terms for more details and other restrictions. ** As part of AWS’s Free Usage Tier, new AWS customers will receive free 15 GB of data transfer out each month aggregated across all AWS services for one year except in the AWS GovCloud Region. *** Rate tiers take into account your aggregate Data Transfer Out usage across Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, AWS Storage Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon VPC.
Amazon EC2 allows you to set up and configure everything about your instances from your operating system up to your applications. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is simply a packaged-up environment that includes all the necessary bits to set up and boot your instance. Your AMIs are your unit of deployment. You might have just one AMI or you might compose your system out of several building block AMIs (e.g., webservers, appservers, and databases). Amazon EC2 provides a number of tools to make creating an AMI easy including the AWS Management Console.
You can also choose from a library of globally available AMIs that provide useful instances. For example, if you just want a simple Linux server, you can choose one of the standard Linux distribution AMIs. Once you have set up your account and uploaded your AMIs, you are ready to boot your instance. You can start your AMI on any number and any type of instance by calling the RunInstances API.
You will be charged at the end of each month for your EC2 resources actually consumed.
As an example, assume you launch 100 instances of the Small type costing $0.085 per hour at some point in time. The instances will begin booting immediately, but they won’t necessarily all start at the same moment. Each instance will store its actual launch time. Thereafter, each instance will charge for its hours (at $.085/hour) of execution at the beginning of each hour relative to the time it launched. Each instance will run until one of the following occurs: you terminate the instance with the TerminateInstances API call (or an equivalent tool), the instance shuts itself down (e.g. UNIX “shutdown” command), or the host terminates due to software or hardware failure. Partial instance hours consumed are billed as full hours.
Getting Started
The best way to understand Amazon EC2 is to work through the Getting Started Guide, part of our Technical Documentation. Within a few minutes, you will be able to log into your own instance and start playing!
Amazon EC2 running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a proven platform to deliver peak performance and includes automatic updates for security patches, bug fixes and new features.
Attend an informative webinar designed for business or technical decision makers and IT professionals and learn more about the top business reasons to run Windows Server, SQL Server, or other Windows Server applications on the AWS Cloud.
Amazon EC2 is hiring to rapidly expand our service.
