Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a fundamental component of AWS, providing scalable and flexible virtual servers in the cloud. EC2 allows users to launch instances (virtual machines) with different configurations based on their computing needs. Users can choose instance types based on CPU, memory, and storage requirements.
With EC2, businesses can deploy applications quickly without investing in physical hardware. Key features include Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, and integration with AWS services like S3 and RDS. Pricing is flexible, offering On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Instances to optimize costs.