Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate themselves from common failure scenarios.


Functionality

• Select a pre-configured, templated image to get up and running immediately. Or create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data, and associated configuration settings.
• Configure security and network access on your Amazon EC2 instance.
• Choose which instance type(s) and operating system you want, then start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs or the variety of management tools provided.
• Determine whether you want to run in multiple locations, utilize static IP endpoints, or attach persistent block storage to your instances.
• Pay only for the resources that you actually consume, like instance-hours or data transfer.

Service Highlights


Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days.

Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. Instances can be rebooted remotely using web service APIs. You also have access to console output of your instances.

Flexible – You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application. For example, your choice of operating systems includes numerous Linux distributions, and Microsoft Windows Server.

Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.

Reliable – Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.

Secure – Amazon EC2 provides numerous mechanisms for securing your compute resources.

• Amazon EC2 includes web service interfaces to configure firewall settings that control network access to and between groups of instances.
• When launching Amazon EC2 resources within Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), you can isolate your compute instances by specifying the IP range you wish to use, and connect to your existing IT infrastructure using industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN. You can also choose to launch Dedicated Instances into your VPC. Dedicated Instances are Amazon EC2 Instances that run on hardware dedicated to a single customer for additional isolation.
• For more information on Amazon EC2 security refer to our Amazon Web Services: Overview of Security Process document.

Inexpensive – Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume. See Amazon EC2 Instance Purchasing Options for a more detailed description.

• On-Demand Instances – On-Demand Instances let you pay for compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments. This frees you from the costs and complexities of planning, purchasing, and maintaining hardware and transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs. On-Demand Instances also remove the need to buy “safety net” capacity to handle periodic traffic spikes.
• Reserved Instances – Reserved Instances give you the option to make a low, one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly usage charge for that instance. After the one-time payment for an instance, that instance is reserved for you, and you have no further obligation; you may choose to run that instance for the discounted usage rate for the duration of your term, or when you do not use the instance, you will not pay usage charges on it.
• Spot Instances – Spot Instances allow customers to bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price. The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids meet or exceed it gain access to the available Spot Instances. If you have flexibility in when your applications can run, Spot Instances can significantly lower your Amazon EC2 costs. See here for more details on Spot Instances.

Features

• Amazon Elastic Block Store
• Multiple Locations
• Elastic IP Addresses
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
• Amazon CloudWatch
• Auto Scaling
• Elastic Load Balancing
• High Performance Computing (HPC) Clusters
• VM Import

For Detail information of all this details please go to http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/