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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)
    8.7
    87%

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

(346)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 65)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
It is good for training big models when getting access to GPU is not possible. If you've access to GPU, then training them on the computer makes more sense as it helps in reducing the cost.

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.
Neel Shah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Good Scenario : EC2 is a wonderful option when you need to execute a lot of compute-intensive tasks, like producing videos or performing scientific calculations. It is the best option for applications that call for a lot of processing power due to its fast CPUs and potent GPUs.Bad Scenario : The best option for conducting lengthy tasks might not be EC2. Since EC2 instances are made to be quickly spun up and down, they might not be the greatest option for jobs that call for prolonged compute cycles.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I think nowadays, Amazon EC2 is best-suited for most app development and deployment use cases, especially if your resource requirements are not fixed over a long period of time. The flexibility provided by the on-demand pricing and rescaling option makes Amazon EC2 a great service, especially if your tech stack already runs on AWS. On the other hand, I think Amazon EC2 is not the best option if your tech infrastructure runs on another public cloud.
Sunny Hemnani | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is very well suited for Java Applications where high availability is required. On production, developers can use a cheaper server and enable auto-scaling & high-performance servers for production. Docker-based or containerized applications are not suited for EC2 servers whereas Elastic Container Service (ECS) is more suited in those cases.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
You should stay away from EC2 if you want savings on your infrastructure bill. Only choose EC2 if you're a large corporation where you are using multiple AWS services and you want to integrate them together seamlessly - and also that infrastructure bill is of no concern to you. You want to also closely monitor your EC2 using cloudwatch (and set up alarms) for smaller instances as they tend to be less stable in my experience. Since I'm a small company, I prefer Linode or Digital Ocean, or OVH over EC2 any day.
Michael Weisel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
With a solid plan, we were able to migrate from our physical servers to our EC2 environment much easier than we had anticipated. Once migrated we found even more use cases for EC2 instances including consolidating services into smaller more efficient and cost-effective instances. Because there are so many choices of EC2 instances, we were able to tailor our environment and test different instances before settling. This also afforded us the flexibility of firing up a quick instance when needed and turning it down when we've completed our task. We have some instances that we use once a month that are all set up and ready to go when we need them.
Ana Baker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The flexibility to select the right resource size for current needs is great - this has allowed us to scale our resources alongside the growth in the amount of work we put through EC2.
The great thing about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud has been that this is one of Cloud Services, and among the most commonly used products for AWS Web service. Very flexible and quick to set up/launch compute resources.
Jacob Biguvu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 can be used for many purposes. EC2 is not best when Amazon provided the expected service and support. For example, AWS Lambda was best to run certain jobs that run within 15 mins. EC2 is not required for the jobs which will be run within 15 mins. Following the best practices of AWS architecture, certainly helpful.
April 28, 2021

EC2 for Startups

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The availability of free tier makes it a good choice to develop and test prototypes in early-stage startups.
The fact that the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud can be turned up quickly in case of an emergency, means that businesses have minimal downtime for their applications which makes Ec2 a great choice for backup and disaster recovery.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon EC2 is one of the best tools a development and software company could ask for. It is infinitely scalable and relatively easy to use when it comes to all the things that we used to do that took a long time because human beings had to provision rack mounted servers by hand. It's less apporpriate for enterprise settings where there is still a presence of older, localized infrastructure.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is really standing out when a team is committed to the AWS stack and wants to deploy production jobs on the long term. Reserved instances have competitive pricing and in general the reliability is guaranteed. Spot EC2 instances are also good, when a one-time backfill or feature generation workload needs to be performed.

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.
Apurv Doshi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is extremely suited when you want to do prototyping before purchasing heavy instance on-premises. This provides a clear indication that what kind of configuration is best suited for the need and demand. It is also flexible in terms of acquiring computational capabilities by spot instance, on-demand instance and reserved instances. We are using it a lot to train Machine Learning models. We made sure the script runs well on a small instance and once the script is finalized, we switch to bigger instances for faster computation.
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is extremely useful for small virtual servers. For instance, we use EC2 instances for inexpensive unifi cloud controllers. Additionally, we often use EC2 instances for testing various applications and server configurations. We can spin up an entire lab, virtual servers, workstations, etc and test out a client-server application in hours and at very little expense.
Gabriel Samaroo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I would recommend using amazon EC2 in any scenario where a company or individual needs to run a server. Because of the ease of use and configuration, there is hardly a reason to buy and manage your own hardware. Anything from a very simple website to a complex application with hundreds of servers can be setup using EC2.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is a perfect solution for a team of skilled developers who are familiar with cloud computing, able to make basic translations, and cannot be hassled by the politics/paperwork shuffle of dealing with the ebb and flow of server changes. EC2 would not be a good solution for a very small team with perhaps a single server need or perhaps a larger team with multiple server needs but without technical personnel.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is very suitable if you have a multi-environment application and you are still using the other services of Amazon, such as Lambda with API Gateway. In our project, we have had more than 10 EC2 instances running for 3 years, and we did not have any downtime or face any security issues.
July 07, 2019

A Great Choice

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is taking over physical and other virtual environments. The ability to quickly turn up and down, clone, create, or terminate a server on the fly, from anywhere in the world is a huge plus. Having the entire environment live in the AWS console means that management is central and much more efficient. EC2 is also great for a dev environment. If you want to, in minutes stand up a dev server, EC2 is the top choice. However, if you require a physical server, obviously AWS EC2 instances will not be the best choice.
June 21, 2019

EC2: Game changer

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If they need anything in the cloud where they want to stand something up from the operating system up, Elastic Compute Cloud is a no brainer. With the versatility and speed to which you can create resources to suit your needs, there is no comparison. Elastic Block Storage, in addition to Elastic Compute Cloud, is a game changer for virtualization.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon EC2 offerings are great if you have web applications that have elastic demand, since Amazon handles the scaling of extra resources all on its own. If the goal is to just host a simple static website, then using regular web hosting companies would be much cheaper and simpler.
Dylan Cauwels | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is great for any scenario where you need to be upgrading/downgrading your compute power as the app demand grows/shrinks. Because of how the storage system, network system, and security system works under AWS, you can hot swap any server into any given slot. But if you want to customize your servers to the nth degree, then you should just go ahead and purchase them for your network. AWS will never be as customizable as company-run machines, but they will be faster to deploy.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is an excellent service if you need to replace the power of a data center with many machines all interconnected with networking and a great automation system to set up your environment in a single button press. It is less ideal for smaller scale operations where you only need a server or two or expect to have very light load on your servers and don't need all the extra power provided by EC2.
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