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…
EC2 - All in one solution
Great cloud service for flexible compute workloads
EC2 is the best compute cloud service provided by any cloud provider.
EC2 is expensive - expect cost overruns - but works as advertised
Highly Recommend AWS's EC2 Instances
Secure and Smartly Control your business with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Easily Setup, Scalable and Manageable Virtual Computing Environment
EC2 for Startups
The best and most scalable cloud infrastructure in the entire world!
My wonderful EC2 Experience
Maximum flexibility. Competitive pricing. Great support.
D…
EC2 - Excellent Cloud Computing Service
1. We host multiple …
The de facto standard cloud VM host
EC2 is my First choice for cloud
Awards
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Popular Features
- Pre-configured templates (17)9.595%
- Dynamic scaling (17)9.393%
- Elastic load balancing (17)9.292%
- Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime (17)8.787%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Data Transfer
$0.00 - $0.09
On-Demand
$0.0042 - $6.528
EBS-Optimized Instances
$0.005
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Training @ VICTORYSOST
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
- 8.7Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime(17) Ratings
The service uptime as a percentage defined in the SLA
- 9.3Dynamic scaling(17) Ratings
Ease of scaling up or down in response to customer needs
- 9.2Elastic load balancing(17) Ratings
Automatic balancing and distribution of resources across multiple virtual computers
- 9.5Pre-configured templates(17) Ratings
Pre-defined templates for virtual machines
- 8.2Monitoring tools(17) Ratings
Monitoring tools provide alerts when problems are detected
- 9.8Pre-defined machine images(17) Ratings
Range of different server configurations available
- 9.6Operating system support(17) Ratings
Range of operating systems available as pre-configured images
- 9.6Security controls(17) Ratings
Compliance with security protocols like SSL and AES
- 8.3Automation(7) Ratings
Automation of administrative tasks
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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 Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(346)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 55)I use the GPU-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances, as for training large models good GPUs with high memory are required. I connect the instance to the S3 bucket where I store that data.
- Deep Learning AMIs.
- Ubuntu Instances.
- Data Security by hiding Public IPs.
- Support for VPN for data security.
- Always ON, never slows down.
- Documentation
- Tutorials for beginners.
- Simplifying Dashboard.
Prefer it when you just can't manage on-premise machines as they require a lot of maintenance and get down quite often. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud takes off that burden from head, i.e. no worry of maintenance and is always ON. Also provide the functionality of scaling up when required.
EC2 - All in one solution
- its pay-as-you-go pricing approach
- effectively provide and manage compute resources
- adjust resource allocation
- nothing as such but some more cross functional policies can be added
Great cloud service for flexible compute workloads
- On-demand usage and pricing
- Scale CPU, memory, and disk up or down easily
- Firewall and security features
- Scale-up CPU and memory separately
- Manage SSH keys via web console
- Faster start and stop times
- Scalability.
- Reliability.
- High Availability.
- Cost per hour.
- Shared memory for multiple instances.
EC2 is expensive - expect cost overruns - but works as advertised
- Easy to use.
- Integrates with other AWS services well.
- Unstable for EC2 instances of small size.
- Expensive compared to Linode, Digital Ocean.
- Hidden charges such as network fees.
Highly Recommend AWS's EC2 Instances
- Saves Money
- Creates Efficiencies
- Easy to Setup
- Easy to Manage
- Minor improvements to the EC2 User Interface
- Dashboard its nice.
- The product is constantly evolving both in terms of features and user-friendliness.
- Sales is present but not pushy.
- Hard to get used to and often need to search for items instead of them being visible.
- More extensive video library instead of written documentation
- Identifying the cost of the resources is not straight forward.
Maximum flexibility. Competitive pricing. Great support.
DevOps supports a fleet of reserved EC2 instances to host backend services and pipelines using Kubernetes.
Data Science team uses EC2 instances to run Jupytor notebooks to do feature exploration on pre-loaded data, and sometimes spot instances to support ad-hoc feature generation and model training. Data team uses the spot instances to run backfill jobs whenever needed.
- A great variety of choices in Amazon Machine Image (AMI) types. Users can select a more basic type to run generic workloads, but also have the choice to pick an AMI pre-installed with specific services in the AWS Marketplace.
- The range of instance types can support the usage from a student's exploration (inexpensive general-purpose nano instances) to an enterprise's most intense workloads (memory or storage-optimized instances with terabytes of memory and ultra-fast network connection).
- The pricing options, from regular instances, reserved instances to spot instances allow users to get the job done and make smart choices about how much they want to pay and when they want to pay.
- The choices on AMIs, instance types and additional configuration can be overwhelming for any non-DevOps person.
- The pricing information should be more clear (than only providing the hourly cost) when launching the instance. AWS DynamoDB gives an estimated monthly cost when creating tables, and I would love to see similar cost estimation showing on EC2 instances individually, as not all developers gets access to the actual bills.
- The term for reserving instances are at least 12 months. With instance types changing so fast and better instances coming out every other day, it's really hard to commit to an existing instance type for 1 or more years at a time.
For users who want to use a managed service, for example a Hadoop platform, I would recommend going with Cloudera and similar companies to get the best support possible.
EC2 - Excellent Cloud Computing Service
1. We host multiple backend and cloud solutions on EC2.
2. When we want to train Machine Learning Models that need heavy computation and GPU power, we go with EC2.
3. Some solutions are not mandatory to keep up all the time. We use cloud formation script which spins up EC2 - host the solution and thrash it down when not needed.
- EC2 has wide variety of machine configurations. If the intended solutions are memory heavy, CPU heavy, GPU heavy or IO heavy, EC2 will provide proper machine configurations as per the requirements.
- EC2 has lot of Machine Images to setup OS and required softwares. It also allows you to create the image of your own disk. This facilitates user to stop the EC2 instance without loosing the work. It helps to reduce the bill. The image can be attached again to EC2 to start from the same place from where it was left.
- Amazon allows different way to obtain instances like on-demand, spot and reserved. Depending upon the need, one can take wise decision to save cost and address the situation in the best possible way.
- This service is a bit difficult to consume. New users need a big learning curve to use this service effectively.
- UI for EC2 service is a little complex and at many places, it misses detailed explanation.
- Sometimes it takes too long to create images of EC2 instances. This keeps your EC2 up for that extra time. When instances are heavy, it penalizes a lot of money.
Since EC2 is a complex service, it requires proper monitoring of usage. While users are a novice, it requires a bit more examination for proper usage.
The de facto standard cloud VM host
- Low-impact virtual servers. If you need a server that consumes very little resources/disk space, EC2 is extremely economical.
- Testing. Spinning up an EC2 virtual machine to test applications, services, etc is invaluable.
- Dealing with small businesses, the recurring cost of a high-performance EC2 instance (or one requiring a ton of S3 storage) might be more than an on-premise server for the same task.
- Even with the AWS cost calculator, it can be difficult to accurately estimate the recurring cost of EC2 instances.
EC2 is my First choice for cloud
- Auto scaling
- Security
- On demand
- I wish amazon come up with a GUI interface for EC2's
Amazon EC2 - Best Cloud Hosting Provider on the market
- Very cost effective
- Easily scalable. Can increase or decrease servers in minutes.
- Very easy to use. Amazing admin console giving you full control of your servers.
- You have the option to do 1 or 3 year reserved instances, but nothing in between.
- AWS CLI (command line interface) can be tricky to learn and use.
- There are a very large amount of services and configuration options, it's sometimes hard to keep track and understand them all.
- It's cost-effective because you pay for only what you use, this is imperative in not-for-profit higher ed, and there are also no long term commitments or upfront fees. This is only one of the pricing options available (the one that best serves us) so there is flexibility.
- Which is my next point, the flexibility of EC2 is what sets is apart from anything else. It is designed to not let the technology get in the way of your ideas and work.
- It is VERY quick and easy to get up and running. Someone brand new to EC2 could have this up and running very fast.
- Performance..EC2 is somewhat slow by comparison and is getting worse as faster processors and hard drives come in the to market.
- Reserved instances.. while they eliminate the price-gap, they do nothing about the performance gap.
- Platform Specific Language that is of any AWS product. The more you need to do with your system and the further you go "inside", the further you go from traditionally recognized languages and their operations. There is a learning curve and it's oftentimes necessary to have support.
- It provides you with static IP addresses.
- Auto-scaling feature.
- Easy to configure and set up your instance.
- You can always change the type of your instances (allocation of more or less CPU/memory for your instance).
- Securely log in to your environment with PEM files.
- I think that AWS Console should have a terminal screen through which you can access your EC2 instances easily in the browser.
- Sometimes you cannot have any clue why the instance is auto-scaled, when you may be pretty sure that there is no high traffic in that particular time.
- The ;earning curve is a bit high in order to make your instances fully configured, and the community is still weak.
A Great Choice
- Quick setup: Once you understand the process, the AWS console makes standing up an EC2 instance a breeze.
- Config options: there are plenty of different types of EC2 instances, all geared for specific use cases.
- Documented processes: Amazon White papers are such a great resource when questions arise.
- Default limit: In an EC2 Instance the default limit is 20 per region, you must request for more per region.
- User knowledge: since it as a new technology, getting our admins trained quickly and efficiently has slowed our efforts.
- Cost of support: if you need to engage AWS support the cost can hurt.
EC2: Game changer
- Quick and easy way to deploy resources based on business needs.
- Vast array of AMI to select based on project requirements.
- Allows for quick access control and scalability based on storage and compute needs.
- Pricing for resources can be expanded on more.
- IP allocation for virtual machines should be sticky even though they are not static.
- AMI pricing should be more under control.
EC2 for scalable web apps
- The ability to expand resources for your cloud deployment depending on demand makes it highly appealing.
- The cloud hosting offers excellent backup capabilities so reverting to an earlier version is a breeze.
- Cloud infrastructure avoids the need for us to maintain hardware resources locally. Security and software patching is all handled remotely.
- The whole process of configuration and spinning up instances requires thorough technical knowledge. The learning curve for it seems a bit daunting.
- The training documentation and support is a bit lacking. We tried using Lambda expressions for program flow execution and did not find great resources on that topic.
EC2- Computing on demand
- Customizable computing is here to stay with EC2. From a minimal 2-core machine for a minimal microservice to the biggest 16-core Xeon with Nvidia Quadros for a machine-learning model, compute power can be immediately up or downsized to your current need at any given moment.
- Cost savings with EC2 is incredible. By putting computer hardware in a communal bidding system, you minimize your cost per server with every other company who also wants those resources. If you have time-independent processes that you need to process, you can even bid on leftover server contracts that have gone unfilled for pennies on the dollar.
- EC2 storage options are lengthy, with EBS volumes, ephemeral storage, and multiple options to customize throughput and storage cost for each one.
- The UI of AWS is quite hard to familiarize with, along with the infrastructure setup. It's a conglomeration of hundreds of acronyms specific to AWS that must be understood including their minutiae to effectively run a cloud deployment. While AWS' documentation is extensive, their beginner-focused guides could use work.
- Instances become incredibly hard to manage after a critical mass, forcing companies to create their own management applications to fill the void that AWS leaves. Along with this, AWS' SDKs can be very poorly documented making this task exponentially more difficult.
- If you lose your SSH key that is released with the creation of the instance, you lose complete access to the server. While I understand the reasoning behind this decision, MFA recovery would be a nice touch.
Fully featured cloud containers
- Easy to start and stop
- Well priced
- Completely customizable
- Difficulty identifying exactly what type of instance you want/need
- Networking can be confusing
- Poor UI
AWS EC2: Best IaaS Solution on the Market
- Provides flexibility to optimize a lot of workloads.
- Provides clear and transparent pricing.
- With enhanced networking, the latest generations provide high bandwidth and low jitter throughput between tiers.
- I can’t think of any
Scale up with EC2!
- Leverage S3 for backup, storage, and serve up large files
- Increased bandwidth
- Increased speed of deployment
- Pay-as-you-use pricing model
- Dependency on the product - major outages leave you in a tough spot.
- Cross-region communication - complex to setup
- Networking is less flexible compared to other providers
EC2 is great when it comes to simplicity and performing
- Easy to maintain. We can elastically grow the instances as we need.
- Can be distributed among several regions, hence it performs well.
- Can be configured to restrict the access to instances outside specific IPs.
- Can be tied to load balancer.
- Spot instances available to bid for cheaper price.
- There should be an option to upgrade to only CPU and memory, instead of getting overall big instances.
- Sometime we are forced to upgrade or terminate old instances. They could support old instances.
- Launch time of the instances has room for improvement. Could be faster.
EC2 is easy to use and extremely useful
- Very easy to use and spin up services and/or instances.
- Quick and trivial setup for hosting code or using computing power.
- Cost effective for sure.
- Auto scaling is fantastic.
- So far there is nothing missing in this product offering that I can think of.
Amazon: Big IaaS option for your business
- Quick learning curve and ease of acquisition for new learners due to their 12 month free trial.
- Connection to the entire AWS ecosystem, such as RDS service for database management.
- Dynamic scaling of instance resources allows you to achieve the performance you are looking for without having to pay more than necessary.
- Hot swap of volumes and other resources.
- You can't easily know the end of free trial period, which can generate monthly costs for unused services (even so, the support for these isolated cases is very good!)
- The default configuration of resource usage alerts could be better. Even so, there are alternatives to control these cases outside of AWS.
- While you're still learning how to handle instances, one can make some serious mistakes, such as leaving open ports or deleting an instance without realizing it. Again, is not a core AWS responsability but a few alerts could be great (or you can leave infraestructure experts handle all the management).
EC2 review from a small interactive shop
- Cost effictiveness is great, they only charge for what you use so you do not have to pay for what you dont use
- Intuitive interface, makes setting up and deploying new and existing projects an ease
- Secure. Have not had server attacks since we migrated to them, so the uptime has been phenomenal
- The PEM keys are a bit confusing if you are not accustomed to it
- A dummy version/starter guide would be great. Once you have it configured its easy to use and makes sense, but my first interaction with it was a bit to grasp
- Add easily installable cPanel or Plesk or equivalent as an option for customers just wanting to host sites, who don't need the more in-depth options