Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a web service in the AWS public cloud that provides scalable computing capacity in the cloud as IaaS.
The desired computing capacity can be configured and requested via the Amazon EC2 web console. The entire execution of the provisioned instance can be controlled and monitored via the AWS web console.
Provisioning a new instance or one preconfigured from an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) takes only a few minutes, allowing dynamic capacities to be quickly adjusted when the processing load increases or decreases.
Payment is only made for the capacity that is actually used.
Amazon EC2 offers the option of automating the management of computing services via the command line interface (CLI) and programming interfaces (API), thereby making the operation of computing power more effective and efficient.