Compute
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon EC2 provides resizable virtual machines with direct control over the operating system, processor architecture, storage, networking, and purchasing model.
Explore pricing models, common use cases, infrastructure support, and the AWS services that commonly work with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud pricing and cost programs
Pricing model: Usage-based compute
- On-Demand
- Available
- Reserved Instances or reserved capacity
- Available
- Savings Plans
- Available
- Spot
- Available
Billing dimensions: Instance time · Operating system and tenancy · Storage and data transfer
Programs and modes: On-Demand Instances · Reserved Instances · Savings Plans · Spot Instances · Capacity Reservations · Dedicated Hosts
Purchase options apply to eligible instance families, Regions, operating systems, and tenancy choices.
Free Tier: Available — verify current offers
Pricing reviewed 2026-07-25. Reviewed against the linked official AWS pricing page. Recheck regional rates and program terms before purchase.
Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-07-21.
Why implement Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud?
- Fits workloads that need operating-system access, specialized instance types, licensing control, or host-level configuration.
- Offers On-Demand, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, Dedicated Hosts, and Capacity Reservations for different cost and capacity goals.
- Integrates with multiple Availability Zones, load balancing, Auto Scaling, EBS, and AWS management services without requiring physical hardware procurement.
How to implement Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
- Choose an AMI and instance type, then define VPC subnets, security groups, an IAM instance role, and encrypted EBS storage.
- For production fleets, put the configuration in a launch template and use an Auto Scaling group across multiple Availability Zones behind a load balancer.
- Bootstrap consistently with image pipelines or user data, manage access and patching with Systems Manager, and add CloudWatch monitoring plus tested backups.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud best practices
- Use federation and IAM roles instead of long-lived credentials, and keep security-group rules as narrow as possible.
- Patch the guest operating system and applications, and use Amazon Inspector or Security Hub controls to find vulnerable or exposed instances.
- Separate operating-system and data volumes, encrypt EBS volumes and snapshots, deploy critical components across Availability Zones, and test recovery.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud use cases and server impact
- Lift-and-shift and commercial software
- Stateful or latency-sensitive applications
- GPU, HPC, and specialized compute workloads
Replaces physical or virtual server hardware while retaining responsibility for the guest operating system, application runtime, patching, and capacity design.
Official implementation resources
Commonly paired AWS services
- Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling — Scale EC2 capacity automatically
- Elastic Load Balancing — Load balancing
- Amazon Elastic Block Store — Block storage for EC2
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud — Isolated virtual network
- AWS Identity and Access Management — Identity & access
- AWS Systems Manager — Operational control
- Amazon CloudWatch — Metrics & logs
- AWS Backup — Centralized backup management
Architecture patterns using this service
- Build a resilient three-tier application on AWS — Route requests through an Application Load Balancer to an EC2 or ECS application tier, keep Amazon RDS private, and govern supported recovery points with AWS Backup.
Planning guides that use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
- Amazon FSx planning guide — Mount the selected FSx family from compatible EC2 workloads in the required network path.
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk planning guide — Elastic Beanstalk provisions EC2 instances, and their type and count set most of the environment cost.
- Amazon EMR planning guide — EMR on EC2 bills the EMR rate on top of EC2 and EBS, where Spot and Reserved pricing still apply.