What is Amazon EC2?

Options

1. Elastic Compute Cloud: the AWS service to rent virtual servers (Correct option)
2. A managed database service that scales automatically on AWS
3. A browser-based code editor that is used for AWS projects
4. A Git hosting service that is run and managed by AWS

Answer

Elastic Compute Cloud: AWS's service for renting virtual servers in the cloud

Why

EC2 lets you launch virtual servers (instances) in minutes, choose CPU, memory and operating system, and pay for the time you use.

You can host a Java application directly on an EC2 instance, or run Docker/Kubernetes on top of it.

Azure's equivalent is Azure Virtual Machines.

Remember

EC2 = rent a virtual server in AWS.

Key terms

• Amazon EC2
• Virtual machine
• AWS (Amazon Web Services)
• Operating system (OS)
• Server
• Kubernetes (K8s)