Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides scalable computing capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Using Amazon EC2 eliminates your need to invest in hardware up front, so you can develop and deploy applications faster. You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or down to handle changes in requirements or spikes in popularity, reducing your need to forecast traffic.
Amazon EC2 provides the following purchasing options for instances:
Pay for the instances that you use by the second, with a minimum of 60 seconds.
You can reduce your Amazon EC2 costs by making a commitment to a consistent amount of usage, in USD per hour, for a term of 1 or 3$
You can reduce your Amazon EC2 costs by making a commitment to a specific instance configuration, including instance type and$
Request unused EC2 instances, which can reduce your Amazon EC2 costs significantly.