EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud

What is EC2?

This is a web service that provides a re-sizable compute in the cloud.

AWS 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.

In the old world if you need an app server or DB server, you would first need to talk to your developer, decide the size and number of cores you need, and then talk to your procurement team, and by the time the server is in your data center it could take 2+ months.

Now with EC2, you have this with a click of a button. This also means from a startup perspective you do not have the upfront cost of buying all the hardware you need.

EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for the capacity that you actually use. You also have several tools at the disposal of the developers to build the applications to be resilient and isolate them from failure scenarios.