Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

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Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Original author(s)	Amazon
Developer(s)	Amazon
Initial release	August 25, 2006; 18 years ago (2006-08-25) (public beta)
Operating system	Linux Microsoft Windows FreeBSD macOS[1]
Available in	English
Type	Virtual private server
License	Proprietary software
Website	aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers – hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy.^[2] In November 2010, Amazon switched its own retail website platform to EC2 and AWS.^[3]