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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Overview

What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and…

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Recent Reviews

EC2 for Startups

9 out of 10
April 28, 2021
Incentivized
EC2 is easy to get started with there are a lot of online resources for help. We use it to serve our online Django-based Rest and Graph …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 9 features
  • Pre-configured templates (17)
    9.5
    95%
  • Dynamic scaling (17)
    9.3
    93%
  • Elastic load balancing (17)
    9.2
    92%
  • Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime (17)
    8.6
    86%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Data Transfer

$0.00 - $0.09

Cloud
per GB

On-Demand

$0.0042 - $6.528

Cloud
per Hour

EBS-Optimized Instances

$0.005

Cloud
per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Training @ VICTORYSOST

YouTube
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Features

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

IaaS provides the basic building blocks for an IT infrastructure like servers, storage, and networking, in an on-demand model over the Internet

9.1
Avg 8.1
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Product Details

What is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and run images on multiple systems.

Key Features

  • Bare metal instances

  • Amazon EC2 Fleet (fleet management)

  • Pause and resume instances

  • GPU compute instances

  • GPU graphics instances

  • High I/O instances

  • Dense HDD storage instances

  • Optimized CPU configurations

  • Flexible storage options

  • Pay-as-you-go pricing

  • Place instances in multiple locations

  • Elastic IP addresses

  • Auto-scale capacity up or down

  • HPC clusters

  • Elastic Fabric Adapter

  • Available on AWS PrivateLink

  • Amazon Time Sync Service

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and run images on multiple systems.

Reviewers rate Pre-defined machine images highest, with a score of 9.8.

The most common users of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(341)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(51-65 of 65)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
November 28, 2017

Best on the market!!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My company is using EC2 for running their website, which includes java web service & angularjs client, which I'm building. I'm a developer, so, I don't have a lot of experience configuring the network. Fortunately, there are people with whom I'm doing it. I just need to define the security group to limit who can access our system. It is easy to setup load balancing & autoscaling.
  • Launch wizards for new users
  • Security groups management for EC2 containers
  • Very easy to use for a regular user
  • Extensive Documentation
  • UI could be improved.
  • They can reduce the price a bit.
  • They can increase the free tier limit.
Before choosing Amazon EC2, I would recommend making some cost projections based on projected use of the application when it goes into production if the projected costs are in the range of your project's capabilities I totally recommend choosing it because you'll avoid costs about data redundancy and system administration.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is being used to host both development/testing and production instances of small-scale web applications (<3000 users). These applications vary in engine (Node, PHP, Python, etc.) and EC2 gives us a flexible, project-agnostic platform to deploy and test upon.

We use EC2 to pull down current master copies of our code for QA as well as reference tagged versions for our production clusters.
  • Cheap -- just about the cheapest you can get out of any options on the market
  • CLI administration makes setup and maintenance a breeze -- version controllable dev infrastructure without the overhead of made-for-purpose infra VCS services is great
  • Flexible authentication systems -- Amazon goes above and beyond to handle complex security arrangements well
  • Well organized web UI
  • Low level networking support is minimal but getting better
  • EBS outages hurt, and I haven't been thrilled with reliability in previous months (it's been better since, though)
  • Latency for storage and instance provisioning can be frustrating while the tech is in the gap between provisioning that takes minutes vs. instant provisioning (waiting 30 secs - 1 minute for storage to provision, for example)
EC2 is awesome if your prime need is scalability -- the "elastic" component of Elastic Compute is really what makes this a win. The ability to scale right up with the click of a button means that provisioning new instances to handle surges in production traffic or creating lots of test beds for the QA team is where your money is well spent. If you don't anticipate peaky traffic or find yourself with very static machine needs, simply provisioning a few instances by hand in the other non-EC2 parts of AWS is probably better -- you might even just consider a couple VPSs.
Jason Andres | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been hosting our SAAS Ecommerce platform since 2008 on Amazon EC2, back when there were only a handful of core services, EC2 , S3 and EBS. We have grown from hosting 300 Ecommerce websites to 1500+ in multiple regions, running 300 to 500 EC2 instances during peak periods.

Amazon EC2 has enabled us to expand into different countries with zero upfront cost, saved us from having to complete at least 2 full hardware refreshes and reduces our costs by allowing us to scale down infrastructure during non peak periods. As of Oct 2nd 2017 EC2 is per second billing, which will save us even more.

Amazon AWS is a trusted brand and has a proven track record providing infrastructure as service with the stability and performance needed to run any workload.

  • EC2 makes it easy to move to the cloud. You can spin up Windows servers, any flavour of Linux, pre-baked amazon public or marketplace images with applications pre-installed.
  • EC2 is great to test your proof of concept. Spin up as many servers as you want for your tests, run your tests for a few minutes and only pay for the time they are running.
  • EC2 with Elastic Load Balancing and AutoScaling provides an environment where you no longer worry about individual servers or about spikes in traffic. Any failed serves are automatically replaced, and when a spike occurs servers scale up and down to handle the load, while keeping costs at a minimum.
  • EC2 parameter store allows us to store application secrets, keeping them secure and only available to EC2 instances with the roles to allow access.
  • The only area for improvement that I've been looking for is shorter billing increments than 1 hour. This has just recently come into effect with per second billing as of Oct 2nd 2017.
EC2 is great for running traditional software workloads, if you are building a new application Lambda may be a better candidate.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's a really good product, that helps our organisation a lot to get great insight from all the data processes we are handling. It’s easy to get a good grasp of it and really fast forward to use. I can recommend it more for companies like ours that need to get more for their money [out of] their data
  • Data and data clustering architecture
  • Data Exploitation process
  • Fair cost for a bay of servers
  • More features already integrated
  • Easy to compute the final cost of the service
  • Always ready to scale up (or down) with your business without extra cost or complication
For any work involving data processes and recovering insights from it, usually the most costly and complex process is to set up the data platform on which all the hard statistical work is done later. With EC2 all those integrations are relatively easy and can be scaled up without too much pain.
Will Stern | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use several dozen EC2 instances for immutable/disposable infrastructure that Docker containers can run on top of. We currently use it in several departments in addition to a private data center, but greatly favor EC2 and are in the process of moving data center servers over to EC2.The price we pay for EC2 is made up because we need less staff managing the infrastructure that we run.
  • Stability is a big key of EC2 - it does what it says it does every time.
  • Flexibility is great for EC2. You can spin up instances from a standard image (e.g. Ubuntu), your own AMI built from CI (unique AMIs for each deployment), or one of the 80k+ of community AMIs.
  • Ability to run instances in your own Virtual Private Cloud - a MUST for many larger organizations.
  • Tremendous security options.
  • Compared to several newer cloud providers (e.g. DigitalOcean), EC2 instances create and destroy very slowly. This is generally not an issue, but can be for some.
  • AWS is incredibly featureful, and therefore, not the most simple of services to learn.
  • AWS is slowly upgrading their UI, which is helpful. It's a little behind other UIs, but not too bad.
The larger the company, the better AWS seems to fit. The 2 primary reasons for this are price and security features. For more budget-focused startups, there are significantly cheaper solutions out there with far fewer security features. Mid-sized to enterprise level companies, however, will require the AWS security features if they are to authorize the use of cloud computing instances over in-house data centers.
Justin Schroeder | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use EC2 and a host of related products to serve up 2 of our 3 SAAS products. EC2 gives us the ability to spin up servers around the world and tightly integrate with other AWS services like RDS and S3. Perhaps the most useful feature of EC2 is the ability to relatively easily create autoscaling clusters of servers to serve your products.
  • A built in service to create autoscaling clusters is a killer feature of EC2. Autoscaling now has a full GUI administration system which allows you to create your clusters by relatively easy point-and-click.
  • Starting, stopping, and monitoring EC2 instances is a total breeze.
  • Autoscaling now has a full GUI administration system which allows you to create your clusters by relatively easy point-and-click.
  • The AIM "Images" are surprisingly reliable and also easy to create. Storing them is an extreemely low cost way to add an additional layer of backup redundancy (although they say it shouldnt be your primary backup). We've found it very convienient.
  • The user interface is still far behind similar tools like Rackspace.
  • You cannot create AIM images without server downtime, so the server you create an image of must be in a cluster behind a load balancer. This is a big drawback compared to other services that can create images while the service is in use. Sometimes you just don't want to use a full cluster for minor applications.
  • Load balancers are really easy to use but lack some features other hosts provide. For example, the SSL termination is not nearly as sophisticated as most standard load balancer servers.
[Well suited for] Creating a high-availability, medium-cost, platform for hosting products. EC2, because of its integration with S3, RDS, CDN and other tooling makes it an absolute must. If you want to host a wordpress site on a single server instance "on the cheap" it's really not the right service. EC2 instances fail at a higher rate than any other web host I've used. The expectation is that if you want even mediocre uptime with AWS you *will* use a server cluster.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Amazon Elastic Cloud (EC2) for our web applications and analytics work. Right now we have implemented it in few departments only but we are planning to implement it across the organization. EC2 is very helpful in providing infrastructure support for a growing business. Earlier we were relying on our in-house infrastructure team, but it's tough to grow infrastructure with your business growth. For a scalable infrastructure we decided to move to the cloud, and after considering many factors we find that AWS EC2 is best for our requirements.
  • One year free tier subscription, which makes it very cost effective for training the new resources.
  • Large communities with thousands of machines having preinstalled software as per need.
  • AWS EC2 has a very competitive pricing scheme with on-demand, spot instances plan and reserved instances.
  • Sharing AMI is the one of best features. You can share your machine image with another user.
  • Although AWS EC2 is best in the market, in addition, they could provide more robust monitoring tools for EC2 resources.
  • They don't have the facility to block IPs for inbound traffic. Although this can be achieved by carefully allowing the inbound traffic. But adding the flexibility to block IPs or exclude some IPs from inbound would be great.
  • They need to provide one dashboard where they could show the list of all the resources from a region. Right now a user needs to select a particular region to check the resources being used.
AWS Elastic Compute Cloud is one of the best cloud computing technologies among all their competitors whether its Azure or Google. AWS EC2 is available with very competitive pricing and based on the wide market it’s very easy to get AWS technical experts. And as it has much more functionality along with EC2 like S3 RDS route53, this makes it a one stop for all infrastructure needs.
Bill Artinger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use EC2 for both our own virtual infrastructure as well as clients. We build, manage and maintain EC2 instances and VPCs. It is being used to solve the problem of hardware depreciation and upkeep. It also helps with uptime and availability and can offer higher promises than if we ran it in-house.
  • We run a backup server in the cloud that is highly elastic - grow or shrink as needed on demand
  • We run image repositories in EC2 and again, they are highly elastic in a sense that you can shrink or grow when needed
  • Amazon is excellent at offering a plethora of services and technologies to mix and match how you need to
  • Amazon should offer a managed option at a premium
  • Amazon EC2 can be daunting and scary - it's all a-la-carte
  • EC2 can be more thorough with documentation or giving case specific examples
EC2 is well suited for professionals who know what they want and need. Speaking generally EC2 would not do well for end-consumers or home users. Its complexity can be tough to bypass and it makes knowing the products, services and technologies essential to its use. Resellers can make lots of money and still keep their manageability at a realistic level!
April 03, 2017

EC2 to the rescue!

Parikshith Malalur Jagadeesh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used it extensively during our projects. Hosted our Webapps on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and also installed MongoDB on it. Used Ubuntu image.
  • Many flavors of Linux are available. Includes Windows also.
  • Very fast in spinning up new instances.
  • Has good monitoring tools.
  • Good documentation of the AMI.
  • Permission issues and Firewall issue for newbies.
  • Include some good GUI native tools.
Quickly deploy server with any operating system without worrying about imaging and setting up.
March 30, 2017

AWS EC2 ROCKS SOCKS

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We started off using it for just our web applications. We are currently in the process of moving it to across the entire org (IT to start using it). It addresses all typical problems. Makes everything easy and performant.
  • Fast
  • Affordable
  • Easy to use
  • Straight to the point
  • A bit of a learning curve at first
  • Not much I would change
  • More free options :)
From small static web sites to full blown applications
Valeri Karpov | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I've used EC2 for numerous use cases:
* Hosting Node.js applications of varying complexity, from borderline static sites (http://plugins.mongoosejs.io/) to more sophisticated apps (http://sixplus.com/)
* Hosting a Go-based CI tool that used the EC2 API to spawn build workers
* Hosting MongoDB instances
EC2 is my go-to tool for any sort of production server application. It's much more cost effective than in-house hardware at the scale I've been working at, primarily because EC2 instances have solid internet connections and don't change the IP of instances while they're running. However, I've started using Azure more as cloud computing is becoming a commodity and Azure gave us a better deal.

  • Point-and-click spawning of production-ready instances running whichever OS you prefer.
  • Solid API for more advanced use cases. Instead of having in-house Windows build machines you can just spawn EC2 instances via API to build your project on demand.
  • AMIs make it easy to set up a machine once and make copies of it once you need to scale.
  • The UI is cumbersome and confusing
  • The API is usually reliable but hard to rely on at scale - spawning a machine via API sometimes just hangs
  • Online support is borderline non-existent. If something goes wrong, you're probably on your own.
EC2 is an excellent alternative to in-house hardware for small to medium sized businesses for hosting web servers and spawning build systems for compiling for different operating systems. It's been powering my production apps for the last 5 years or so, ever since I gave up on the idea of having my business running off of desktops in my dorm room. However, cloud computing is rapidly becoming a commodity: my current company runs mostly on Azure, my blog is a static site hosted on GitHub pages, and both of these decisions were made simply because Microsoft and GitHub offered more cost-effective solutions for my use case. EC2 is great, but not sufficiently better than DigitalOcean, Azure, etc. to justify paying extra in my experience.
Anatoly Geyfman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I've used EC2 for both personal projects, as well as evaluation for moving my company's infrastructure to EC2. I used EC2 for hosting a pretty standard Node/Mongo/Angular/Nginx application. In EC2 we put up a few servers - the API was on one, along with Angular, mongo was a second server and the nginx server served as a proxy. We chose EC2 because it was simple to get up and running and we already have experience w/ it.
  • Industry standard -- most people who've worked w/ cloud applications have used EC2.
  • Easy self-service provisioning once you have IAM configured correctly.
  • Lots of compute units with memory / CPU and storage differentiation, many ways to set up a cost-effective environment.
  • Can't create custom compute units (specific RAM, SSD and CPU allotments).
  • IO seemed to be slower than Google Compute Engine.
  • IAM is not straightforward to configure.
It's great to prototype cloud infrastructure, and when you need some very specific configurations. EC2 is well suited to dynamically growing infrastructure based on demand, for self-service environments for your engineering team, and for very particular configurations where other cloud vendors may not have a specific solution. Great for legacy applications.
August 30, 2016

Amazon EC2

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
This is our primary data store. We use it for both versioning our deployment builds as well as for storing static assets. This addresses the business problem of having a server to store assets as well as giving us the ability to store multiple versions of files that we deploy to production. Its bundling and easy interface make it an obvious choice.
  • It is incredibly easy to manage the content both in their dashboard and the terminal
  • It's makes scaling trivial
  • The price per benefit ratio is the standard
  • It can be complicated for new users
  • It is one of the pricier solutions, but you get what you pay for
  • Sometimes understanding how to interface it with other products is difficult
It's great for almost any situation, both big and small. The only time I would not recommend it is if the use case is incredibly trivial or the user is trying to save money. It's definitely the perfect option for any startup that needs a solution when they're small but also the flexibility to scale as the company grows.
David Choi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The organization uses EC2 for any cloud computing we don't want to do locally. Specifically, my team uses EC2 to do large data processing jobs. We have Docker images of environments that have exactly the installations of languages and dependencies that we need for a specific task or set of tasks--from there, EC2 reads in data from the data source and writes data to some database or S3.
  • Flexible: Can get exactly the specs you need, on demand.
  • AWS CLI: The EC2 API via the AWS CLI is great for debugging, monitoring, etc.
  • Reliable: Rarely have problems or unexpected behavior related to EC2 itself.
  • Logging: Sometimes getting the correct logs are difficult.
  • Speed: Spinning up a cluster isn't always fast.
  • Pricing: The documentation isn't super clear on how hours are incurred for pricing.
EC2 is appropriate for:
  • Long running tasks
  • Tasks that require additional computing power
  • Tasks that require variable amounts of computing power
  • Scheduled tasks
  • Tasks that require a specific build of a language

It is not as appropriate for:
  • Doing scheduling itself
  • Very on-demand tasks (other AWS options are better)
  • Companies on an extreme budget
Craig Nash | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I utilize Amazon EC2 as a tool to rapidly and cost effectively deploy and upgrade network infrastructure for a wide range of businesses, and it has become not only an essential tool, but an entire business model within itself. In a nutshell, EC2 is a virtual server system, not unlike VMWare, that runs on hardware and bandwidth operated by Amazon Web Services, which allows me to configure and deploy a wide range of servers with a few clicks of a mouse for pennies of what it would cost to run a server in house. I am utilizing it for corporate infrastructure (Intranet), development environments, and full production environments, deploying everything from Active Directory, to Outlook Server, to full LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) and Windows IIS Web Servers for running internal Intranet services such as CRM, ERP, and Sales software suites to full external access web servers powering web sites, E-Commerce Platforms, and App servers. EC2 allows me to do anything I could do with a conventional hardware cost, at a fraction of the hardware, infrastructure, or IT management cost of a physical server.
  • Deploys Virtual Servers, which are very easily configurable and deployable, regardless of experience.
  • Saves cost by reducing physical hardware costs, and IT management costs.
  • Allows very fast deployment of servers, within minutes instead of hours.
  • Offers a wide variety of additional services, including S3 storage, RDS Database services, & more, at one easy web portal with one bill.
  • Remote desktops are one of the few areas where EC2 doesn't work well due to the hardware requirements, though AWS has recently released a remote desktop service that comes out to being more cost effective than an internal Citrix deployment.
  • Hardware customization is also rather hard to deal with, as few options are available when choosing a configuration, which can cause problems in heavily customized OS systems, and development scenarios.
  • EC2 on its own is flawed in the way it is deployed, having the customer chose a geographic "zone" where the services are hosted, which sort of kills one of the main reasons for using the cloud, which is being geographically diverse.
  • EC2 supposedly gives you the ability to "choose" your geographical location, "if it is not under heavy use". This is one problem I have run into lately, as many of my customers are in California, and are being required to use an Oregon zone due to high use if they want to avoid additional charges. Think of zones in a real estate sense, location is cost. This can become an issue when competition is high, because users hate to wait for a site to load. If you are in CA, serving CA customers through an Oregon zone, your service will be slower than competition physically hosted in California.
EC2 is a great service for anyone that wants to quickly and cost effectively deploy and operate web servers, as anyone with any level of experience can launch a machine within minutes, having almost zero prior experience in very little time. In other words, if you are a startup with limited funds and staff that just needs to deploy an environment very rapidly, while saving as much money and time as possible, then no better solution is available, the same can also be said for an existing company with the same goals. Yet, if your business is in a competitive field, where page load times, site uptime, and stability are critical, then other options do exist, and those options are slowly creeping down to the same area as AWS. Take advantage of the one year AWS trial, before you start paying for services.
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