Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is an AWS Cloud service which offers to rent virtual servers. The cost of the service generally depends on the performance of the rented instances and their time of use; however four different pricing options are available:

• On demand
• Spot
• Reserved pricing
• Dedicated pricing

The service allows to launch the number of desired virtual servers, their operating system, configure security and networking and manage their storage.Thus the goal of Amazon EC2 is to provide a scalable computing capacity to adjust the available resource to the usage.

Instances can be spread across different Availability Zones and regions. Amazon EC2 uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), which provides persistent storage of EC instances. As the EBS volumes are connected to the network, they are independent of the lifetime of each instance. In addition, Amazon EC2 uses elastic IP addresses, that is to say optimized for cloud computing.