Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) forms a central part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), by allowing users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the hour for active servers - hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy.
In November 2010 Amazon switched its own retail website to using EC2 and AWS.
History
Amazon announced a limited public beta test of EC2 on August 25, 2006, offering access on a first-come, first-served basis.
Amazon added two new instance types (Large and Extra-Large) on October 16, 2007. On May 29, 2008, two more types were added, High-CPU Medium and High-CPU Extra Large. There are twelve types of instances available.
