What is an EC2 instance?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a service that provides scalable computing capacity in the AWS cloud. It removes the need to invest in hardware upfront, so you can develop and deploy applications faster.

You can use EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. It lets you scale up or down to handle changes in demand or spikes in popularity, reducing the need to forecast traffic.