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Amazon EC2

Secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload

Why Amazon EC2?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 1000 instances and choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help you best match the needs of your workload. We are the first major cloud provider that supports Intel, AMD, and Arm processors, the only cloud with on-demand EC2 Mac instances, and the only cloud with 400 Gbps Ethernet networking. We offer the best price performance for machine learning training, as well as the lowest cost per inference instances in the cloud. More SAP, high performance computing (HPC), ML, and Windows workloads run on AWS than any other cloud.

Pricing

Try EC2 for free

New AWS customers will receive up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits, which can be applied towards eligible AWS services, including Amazon EC2. Free plan eligible instances include: T3.micro, T3.small, T4g.micro, T4g.small, C7i-flex.large, M7i-flex.large

Learn more about the AWS Free Tier

Pay for what you use with per-second billing

Per-second billing removes the cost of unused compute time from your bill. This particularly helps workloads that run over irregular time periods.

View detailed pricing

Benefits

SLA commitment

Access reliable, scalable infrastructure on demand. Scale capacity within minutes with SLA commitment of 99.99% availability.

AWS Nitro System

Provide secure compute for your applications. Security is built into the foundation of Amazon EC2 with the AWS Nitro System.

Optimize performance and cost

Optimize performance and cost with flexible options like AWS Graviton-based instances, Amazon EC2 Spot instances, and AWS Savings Plans.

AWS Migration Tools

Migrate and build apps with ease using AWS Migration Tools, AWS Managed Services, or Amazon Lightsail. Learn how AWS can help.

Features

Global infrastructure

Amazon EC2 provides the ability to place instances in multiple locations. Amazon EC2 locations are composed of Regions and Availability Zones. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location.

Optimal storage for every workload

Different Amazon EC2 workloads can have vastly different storage requirements. Beyond the built-in instance storage, we also offer Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) to suit other cloud storage workload requirements. Amazon EBS provides persistent, highly available, consistent, low-latency block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances, while Amazon EFS provides simple, scalable, persistent, fully managed cloud file storage for shared access.

Scale seamlessly

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. You can use the dynamic and predictive scaling policies within EC2 Auto Scaling to add or remove EC2 instances.

See all EC2 features

Use cases

Run cloud-native and enterprise applications

Amazon EC2 delivers secure, reliable, high-performance, and cost-effective compute infrastructure to meet demanding business needs.

Scale for HPC applications

Access the on-demand infrastructure and capacity you need to run HPC applications faster and cost-effectively.

Develop for Apple platforms

Build, test, and sign on-demand macOS workloads. Access environments in minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing.

Train and deploy ML applications

Amazon EC2 delivers the broadest choice of compute, networking (up to 400 Gbps), and storage services purpose-built to optimize price performance for Machine Learning (ML) projects.

Resources

Documentation

Missing alt text value Access comprehensive user guides with instructions for how to configure Amazon EC2 features.

Blogs

Missing alt text value Check out the latest blog posts on Amazon EC2 to get started.

All EC2 instances

Missing alt text value Amazon EC2 provides over 850 instance types optimized to fit different use cases.

What's new

Check out the latest with Amazon EC2.

Amazon EC2 Hpc8a Instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors are now available

Amazon EC2 Hpc8a instances are now avaiable. These instances are ideal for compute-intensive tightly coupled HPC workloads, including computational fluid dynamics, simulations for faster design iterations, high-resolution weather modeling within tight operational windows.

Link to story

Amazon EC2 C8id, M8id, and R8id instances with up to 22.8 TB local NVMe storage are generally available

Amazon EC2 C8id, M8id, and R8id instances are now available. These instances are backed by up to 22.8TB of NVMe-based SSD block-level instance storage physically connected to the host server. These instances deliver up to 43% higher compute performance and 3.3 times more memory bandwidth compared to previous sixth-generation instances.

Link to story

Ready to deploy applications without hardware constraints?

Secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
Get started with Amazon EC2

FAQs

    Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud.  The Amazon EC2 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.

    To sign up for Amazon EC2, select the “Sign up for This Web Service” button on the Amazon EC2 detail page. You must have an AWS account to access this service; if you do not already have one, you will be prompted to create one when you begin the Amazon EC2 signup process. After signing up, please refer to the Amazon EC2 documentation, which includes our Getting Started Guide.

    Until now, small developers did not have the capital to acquire massive compute resources and ensure they had the capacity they needed to handle unexpected spikes in load. Amazon EC2 helps developers use Amazon’s own benefits of massive scale with no upfront investment or performance compromises. Developers are now free to innovate knowing that no matter how successful their businesses become, it will be inexpensive and simple to ensure they have the compute capacity they need to meet their business requirements.The “Elastic” nature of the service allows developers to instantly scale to meet spikes in traffic or demand. When computing requirements unexpectedly change (up or down), Amazon EC2 can instantly respond, meaning that developers have the ability to control how many resources are in use at any given point in time. In contrast, traditional hosting services generally provide a fixed number of resources for a fixed amount of time, meaning that users have a limited ability to easily respond when their usage is rapidly changing, unpredictable, or is known to experience large peaks at various intervals.

    Amazon EC2 provides a truly elastic computing environment. 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. When you need more instances, you simply call RunInstances, and Amazon EC2 will typically set up your new instances in a matter of minutes. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.

    See a list of all FAQs here.

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