Amazon EC2 instance – a virtual server in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud that helps apps run on the Amazon Web Services (AWS). With EC2 users can run applications in a virtual machine (VM), which is a virtualized computing environment.
Amazon has several types of instances with different CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources configurations. Each type has various sizes that address particular workload requirements.
Instances are created from templates – Amazon Machine Images (AMI). They are configured with an operating system (OS) and other software, which determines the user’s operating environment. Users can select an AMI provided by AWS, user community, or AWS Marketplace. Users also can create and share their own AMIs.
The Amazon EC2 instance: