DEV Community

Ashish Dedaniya
Ashish Dedaniya

Posted on

What is AWS EC2

EC2 is a virtual machine that represents a physical server for you to deploy your applications. Instead of purchasing your own hardware and connecting it to a network, Amazon gives you nearly unlimited virtual machines to run your applications while they take care of the hardware.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services, that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications

The cloud providers like AWS buy high configuration machines and install multiple virtual machines in a single physical system. A single system can contain a Linux OS, Windows OS, or a Mac OS.

When you create an EC2 instance from AWS, you basically rent a dedicated virtual machine on a shared computer. That is how Cloud providers provide you with Virtual Machines.

Also, it is free to start for few hours in initial trial.

You have a Mac OS but you need a Windows OS to run a certain software which is compatible with Mac OS. Instead of investing in a new laptop/desktop for a few hours of work, you can rent a Windows Virtual Machine through EC2 and use it whenever you need.

You need a Windows system with an 8 GB RAM and a 100 GB storage to run your software, you could rent a system with the exact specifications via AWS. Also, a cloud-based virtual machine is not as expensive as buying a new computer.

You can connect to your virtual machine with your mobile phone or your PC which makes it completely portable.

For more information about EC2 refer https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ec2/

Hope this helps!

Top comments (0)