What Is EC2?
Learn the difference between EC2 instances and physical servers, and learn the properties of EC2 instances.
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EC2 stands for “Elastic Compute Cloud,” and it’s one of AWS’s oldest offerings. AWS describes it with the headline: “Secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload.”
The easiest way to think of it is servers in the cloud that we can rent on demand.
AWS EC2’s offering is quite extensive by now and covers a wide range of hardware. AWS calls the different types instance types and gives them names like t2.micro or m6g.medium.
Virtualized vs. bare metal
When EC2 started, all of their instance types were virtualized machines, but this has changed in recent years. Now, AWS offers bare metal machines as well. But what exactly is the difference?
For end users, they appear the same in the EC2 console, and we can use them interchangeably. Under the hood, it looks a bit different:
- Virtualized machines use virtualization technology (Amazon calls its newest virtualization technology Nitro) to put multiple virtual servers onto one physical server. As a user, we have no direct access to the underlying hardware. The benefit for