What Is AWS EC2?

Amazon EC2, short for Elastic Compute Cloud, is the foundational compute service of AWS. It lets you rent virtual servers — known as instances — on demand, without buying or maintaining physical hardware. You pick an Amazon Machine Image (the operating system and software template), choose an instance type that defines the CPU, memory, storage, and networking, and launch it in any AWS region within minutes. EC2 is the building block behind a huge share of the modern internet.

EC2 instances are organized into families tuned for different workloads. Burstable t-family instances (like t3.micro) are cheap and ideal for dev, test, and low-traffic sites. Compute-optimized c-family instances suit CPU-heavy work such as batch processing and game servers. Memory-optimized r-family instances handle in-memory databases and analytics, while GPU-accelerated p- and g-family instances power machine learning and rendering. Picking the right family for your workload is the single biggest factor in both performance and cost.

Pricing follows AWS’s pay-as-you-go model. On-demand instances bill per second (with a 60-second minimum) at published rates and can be started or stopped at will. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans offer up to 72% off in exchange for a one- or three-year commitment, and Spot Instances use spare capacity for up to 90% off but can be reclaimed with two minutes’ notice. Storage (EBS volumes) and data transfer are billed separately on top of the instance rate.

To use EC2 you need an active, verified AWS account with sufficient vCPU quota. New accounts start with low default limits and must request increases through AWS Support, which can take days. Our verified AWS accounts come with raised vCPU quotas — from 8 up to 512 vCPUs — and optional pre-loaded credits, so you can launch EC2 instances at scale immediately instead of waiting on approvals.