Skip to main content
TrustRadius
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…

Read more
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 …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

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

View all pros & cons
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

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
Return to navigation

Product Demos

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Training @ VICTORYSOST

YouTube
Return to navigation

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
Return to navigation

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).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(341)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 65)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
September 15, 2018

Scale up with EC2!

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) across the Engineering team as a way to deploy our applications. It allowed us to scale up from Heroku as we continue to grow. It also helped the ease of have all of our services under the AWS umbrella for accessibility.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used by whole organization. We use hundreds of EC2 instances. We are a small company so we do not have resources to maintain physical instances. EC2 solves this issue by omitting the need to maintain our own servers or machines.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon EC2 helps add flexibility, versatility, security and is easily scalable. We use it for a few web applications internally and have enjoyed using the compute engine offered by Amazon. To add it to its pro's it also supports all the programming languages we utilize and more in case a developer would like to use another language.
Miguel Angel Merino Vega | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Both our customers and we have a wide range of applications uploaded in Amazon EC2. Since we do not have physical servers, we have EC2 instances in our testing, development, production and administrative departments. Also, we support many clients who prefer to manage their own EC2 instances. EC2 instances allow us to abstract all the management of servers and concentrate on what really generates value in our business: building solutions for our clients.
Corey Birkmann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have utilized EC2 for a wide variety of clients to help deploy a variety of websites & web applications & mobile apps. It is affordable and scalable. Has provide phenomenal uptime, and support has been top notch on the rare occasion I have had to reach out on an issue or question.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is begin used in our organization for a little over 2 years. EC2 has addressed cost and quality, but not customer support, in comparison to GCP and Azure. We are running a few workloads on AWS, including EC2. We moved to AWS after we faced a major performance drop in GoDaddy VPS, and cost was peaking out. Then we evaluated AWS and moved on
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
All our APIs and microservices in our organization run on EC2. My organization is one of the largest users of AWS cloud. We have our dev, qa, perf, prod environments running on AWS. As part of that, most of our code runs directly on EC2 or on ECS which itself runs on EC2.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Generally, I've seen EC2 used by the entire company as I've worked mostly in environments where there were only other Software Engineers making up the bulk of the company.

It frequently addressed the issue of having reliable web servers or virtual machines without having to actually acquire physical servers, rely on resellers of the service or deal with other providers who I've had technical issues with in the past.
James Hilton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for dev instances, staging instances and production instances for the whole organization. We automatically spin up instances as needed, automatically configure the settings and software we need, and it's ready to go in seconds. Prior to this we used managed hosting which caused too many problems with bad customer support and limited access to the servers preventing us from solving our own problems with bugs and scaling.
Lynn Thames | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use EC2 instances to deploy development, staging, and test environments. We also use EC2 to manage Magento ecommerce sites for clients. We also deploy our SaaS customer portal solution on AWS EC2 instances. It is mainly used by our development team. It provides us scalable development capabilities and the ability to easily deploy dev copies of any client site.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in all areas of our organization. A lot of our legacy infrastructure is in EC2 that supports every person in the organization. It's a great way to build a computer resource, on the fly, and in many different instance sizes. The resource selection is amazing.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon EC2 is being used by the whole engineering department and also in production to deploy cloud applications. All the REST APIs are being developed and deployed on EC2 instances using the JAVA application. It solves one of the most important problems for our organization, in that it has multiple copies of application servers through EC2 and is highly available.
Brendon Brown | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been using Amazon's EC2 service to host our Magento eCommerce website on Amazon's AMI. We have been doing this for 10 months now, and between uptime and manageability we are very pleased. We chose this platform for the attractive prospect of usage-based billing and potential for provisioning more resources as we grow as well as auto-scaling and load balancing options. The migration was hand-in-hand with a re-development, platform and host were new, so comparing to our old Wordpress store on shared hosting would not be apples to apples at all. All said, we have been please with AWS EC2 on the whole.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is currently being utilized by the IT department to extend our DMZ capabilities. Our corporate location is located deep in the woods, and connection with the outside world can be tenuous. EC2 allows our small company to sit servers on world class hardware in prime locations, granting our customers speed and reliability we wouldn't otherwise be able to offer.
Michael Kerzner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
We are a Managed Services Provider in the Philadelphia area that specializes in moving clients to the cloud. As part of our Cloud Stack, we heavily deploy AWS technologies including EC2. I personally manages multiple AWS accounts that all have EC2 instances in both development and production. EC2 tackles a huge problem when it comes to right-sizing your servers. With EC2, we can spin up a server in the cloud for a client, let them test it, and if it turns out the specs aren't right, within 5 minutes we can have everything changed to a completely different set of specs.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our product was redesigned from the ground up to use EC2. The way that our product has been architected helps up utilize the EC2 infrastructure effectively and has cut our hosting costs by 900%. It has also greatly lowers the difficulty of deploying new releases to all of our customers.
Greg Schulz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Server StorageIO leverages AWS EC2 on different instance types for various Windows as well as Linux images to meet scaling and performance requirements. Workloads vary from I/O workload test, simulation, functionality, performance among others. In addition to EC2 instances, have also used AWS Lightsail VPS instances including for Wordpress as a BC/DR resource.
Bill Artinger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our whole organization uses EC2 in a sense that all of our data and all of our clients' backups are stored there. We can address the problem of availability and scalability, putting both us and our customers at ease. They can know their data is safe and always available to them regardless of conditions
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use EC2 to run all of our .NET and Python application software. It is used by my engineering team as well as various other engineering teams that are running their workloads on AWS. EC2 allows us to have granular control over our hardware as well as gives us the flexibility to change the hardware and scale in/out based on demand. This helps us control our costs and invest when we need to support a spike in usage.
Brandon Shandelson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have used AWS to provide web infrastructure including load balancing, databases, web servers, and content distribution. It's great for this because it offers so many tools without having to pay the up-front cost of deploying them. You pay for what you use. That does not mean it's cheap, but at least it's accessible. The speed of deployment is also a benefit.
Brian Dentino | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are hosting a public-facing web application and some internal workers/APIs on a medium-sized pool of EC2 instances. We use Docker with a container orchestration system to manage these services. By running directly on EC2, we are able to utilize spot pricing which saves us 80-90% on our hosting costs.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use EC2 within our R&D department as well as our security division for the purpose of having a segmented and easy to scale environment for testing and for secure remove server access in the case of an emergency. So in short, it's our playground where we don't have to worry about making mistakes.
Anudeep Palanki | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We started using Amazon EC2 as a part of a bigger push by our organization to shift our datacenters to Cloud with Amazon being our choice of providers. It is being used by our entire organization, but our team used EC2 to host Neo4J. The EC2 addresses the problem of managed infrastructure. We added additional scripts to create and maintain the backups of Neo4J database using the EC2 snapshot service.
December 14, 2017

AWS EC2 Thoughts!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
EC2 is leveraged to meet the computing needs of various enterprise digital workloads. It is used by various projects within each LOB across the enterprise. It helps solve the business problems such as lower the TCO, position for greater innovation, faster delivery to market, minimize security risks of public info, greater agility, global launch etc.
Return to navigation