Full-Scale Web Services Cloud Platform
AWS consists of many cloud services that you can use in combinations tailored to your business or organizational needs. This section introduces the major AWS services by category. To access the services, you can use the AWS Management Console or the Command Line Interface.
Elastic Web-Scale Computing
Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.
Completely Controlled
You have complete control of your Amazon EC2 instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. You can stop your Amazon EC2 instance while retaining the data on your boot partition, and then subsequently restart the same instance using web service APIs. Instances can be rebooted remotely using web service APIs. Instances can be rebooted remotely using web service APIs. You also have access to console output of your instances.
Flexible Cloud Hosting Services
You can choose among multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select the memory configuration, CPU, instance storage, and boot partition size that are optimal for the operating system and applications that you choose. For example, your choice of operating systems includes numerous Linux distributions and Microsoft Windows Server10.
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 DynamoDB, 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 data centers. The Amazon EC2 service level agreement (SLA) commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 region.
Secure
Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC11) to provide security and robust networking functionality for your compute resources.
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 Options13 for a more detailed description.