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  "description": "Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is AWS's primary virtual machine service. EC2 provisions virtual servers (instances) in minutes, billed by the second, with a wide selection of CPU, memory, GPU, and network configurations. EC2 launched in 2006 and remains the bedrock compute primitive on which much of AWS is built.\n\n\nCore concepts\n\n * Instance type. A family + size that defines CPU, memory, storage, and network capacity (e.g. m7i.xlarge, c7g.large, g5.2xlarge).\n * AMI (Amazon Machine Image). T",
  "path": "/engineering-glossary/ec2-virtual-machines-aws/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-12T18:49:30.000Z",
  "site": "https://sahilkapoor.com",
  "tags": [
    "AWS",
    "Cloud Computing",
    "S3",
    "Lambda",
    "Region",
    "Availability Zone"
  ],
  "textContent": "**Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)** is AWS's primary virtual machine service. EC2 provisions virtual servers (instances) in minutes, billed by the second, with a wide selection of CPU, memory, GPU, and network configurations. EC2 launched in 2006 and remains the bedrock compute primitive on which much of AWS is built.\n\n## Core concepts\n\n  * **Instance type.** A family + size that defines CPU, memory, storage, and network capacity (e.g. `m7i.xlarge`, `c7g.large`, `g5.2xlarge`).\n  * **AMI (Amazon Machine Image).** The OS image used to boot the instance.\n  * **EBS volume.** Network-attached block storage; persists independently of the instance.\n  * **Security group.** Stateful instance-level firewall rules.\n  * **Key pair.** SSH credentials used at launch; the instance has the public key, the user holds the private key.\n  * **VPC and subnet.** The virtual network the instance lives in.\n\n\n\n## Purchase options\n\n  * **On-demand.** Pay per second, no commitment.\n  * **Reserved Instances and Savings Plans.** Commit to one or three years for substantial discounts.\n  * **Spot.** Use spare capacity at up to 90% off; can be reclaimed with a two-minute notice.\n  * **Dedicated Hosts and Instances.** Hardware not shared with other AWS customers, for licensing or compliance needs.\n\n\n\n🔗\n\n**Related Terms**\nAWS, Cloud Computing, S3, Lambda, Region, Availability Zone.",
  "title": "EC2",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-13T19:14:28.977Z"
}