Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows us to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides us with complete control of our computing resources and lets us run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.
Amazon EC2 offers the broadest and deepest compute platform with choice of processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model. Amazon offer the fastest processors in the cloud and are the only cloud with 400 Gbps ethernet networking. Amazon have the most powerful GPU instances for machine learning training and graphics workloads, as well as the lowest cost-per-inference instances in the cloud. More SAP, HPC, Machine Learning, and Windows workloads run on AWS than any other cloud.
Amazon EC2 offers the broadest and deepest choice of instances, built on the latest compute, storage, and networking technologies and engineered for high performance and security.
Faster innovation and increased security with AWS Nitro System
The AWS Nitro System is the underlying platform for amazon’s next generation of EC2 instances that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware and software to deliver high performance, high availability, and high security while also reducing virtualization overhead. The Nitro System is a rich collection of building blocks that can be assembled in many different ways, giving us the flexibility to design and rapidly deliver new EC2 instance types with an ever-broadening selection of compute, storage, memory, and networking options.
Choice of processors
A choice of latest generation Intel Xeon, AMD EPYC, and AWS Graviton CPUs enables us to find the best balance of performance and price for our workloads. EC2 instances powered by NVIDIA GPUs and AWS Inferentia are also available for workloads that require accelerated computing such as machine learning, gaming, and graphic intensive applications.
High performance storage
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides easy to use, high performance block storage for use with Amazon EC2. Amazon EBS is available in a range of volume types that allow you to optimize storage performance and cost for our workloads. Many EC2 instance types also come with options for local NVMe SSD storage for applications that require low latency.
Enhanced networking
AWS is the first and only cloud to offer 400 Gbps enhanced Ethernet networking for compute instances. Enhanced networking enables us to get significantly higher packet per second (PPS), lower network jitter, and lower latency. For high performance computing (HPC) applications, Elastic Fabric Adapter is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that offers low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect between compute nodes to help scale applications to thousands of cores.
Choice of purchasing model
We offer a choice of multiple purchasing models with On-Demand, Spot Instances, and Savings Plan. With Spot Instances, we can save up to 90% for fault-tolerant workloads. With Savings Plan, we can save up to 72% savings with committed usage and flexibility across EC2, Fargate, and Lambda. We can also optimize our costs with recommendations on instances, built into EC2 with AWS Compute Optimizer or through tools such as Cost Explorer.
