Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides on-demand, scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Using Amazon EC2 reduces hardware costs so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage.
You can add capacity (scale up) to handle compute-heavy tasks, such as monthly or yearly processes, or spikes in website traffic. When usage decreases, you can reduce capacity (scale down) again.
The following diagram shows a basic architecture of an Amazon EC2 instance deployed within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). In this example,
the EC2 instance is within an Availability Zone in the Region. The EC2 instance is secured with a security group, which is a virtual firewall that controls incoming and outgoing traffic. A private key is stored on the local computer and a public key is stored on the instance. Both keys are specified as a key pair to prove the identity of the user. In this scenario, the instance is backed by an Amazon EBS volume. The VPC communicates with the internet using an internet gateway. For more information about Amazon VPC, see the Amazon VPC User Guide.
A basic architecture diagram of an EC2 instance within a VPC.
Tip
This user guide provides information specific to running Linux-based instances on Amazon EC2. See the EC2 User Guide for Windows Instances for information to help you run Windows-based instances on EC2.
Amazon EC2 supports the processing, storage, and transmission of credit card data by a merchant or service provider,
and has been validated as being compliant with Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS).
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- For more information about PCI DSS, including how to request a copy of the AWS PCI Compliance Package, see PCI DSS Level 1. `
If you are looking for technical guidance about Amazon EC2, try AWS re:Post.
For more information about cloud computing, see What is cloud computing?
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