Amazon EC2 Functionality

Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to launch instances with a variety of operating systems, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.

To use Amazon EC2, you simply:

• Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings. Or use pre-configured, templated images to get up and running immediately.
• Upload the AMI into Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 provides tools that make storing the AMI simple. Amazon S3 provides a safe, reliable and fast repository to store your images.
• Use Amazon EC2 web service to configure security and network access.
• Choose which instance type(s) and operating system you want, then start, terminate, and monitor as many instances of your AMI as needed, using the web service APIs or the variety of management tools provided.
• Determine whether you want to run in multiple locations, utilize static IP endpoints, or attach persistent block storage to your instances.
• Pay only for the resources that you actually consume, like instance-hours or data transfer.

Service Highlights

Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.

Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. Instances can be rebooted remotely using web service APIs. You also have access to console output of your instances.

Flexible – You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, and instance storage that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application. For example, your choice of operating systems includes numerous Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows Server and OpenSolaris.

Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.

Reliable – Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The service runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters.

Features for Building Failure Resilient Applications – Amazon EC2 provides users powerful features to build failure resilient applications including:

• Amazon Elastic Block Store – Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) offers persistent storage for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes provide off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of an instance. Amazon EBS volumes are highly available, highly reliable volumes that can be attached to a running Amazon EC2 instance and are exposed as standard block devices. Amazon EBS volumes offer greatly improved durability over local Amazon EC2 instance stores, as Amazon EBS volumes are automatically replicated on the backend (in a single Availability Zone). For those wanting even more durability, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time consistent snapshots of your volumes that are then stored in Amazon S3, and automatically replicated across multiple Availability Zones. These snapshots can be used as the starting point for new Amazon EBS volumes, and can protect your data for long term durability. See Amazon Elastic Block Store for more details on this feature.

• Multiple Locations – Amazon EC2 provides the ability to place instances in multiple locations. Amazon EC2 locations are composed of Regions and Availability Zones. Availability Zones are distinct locations that are engineered to be insulated from failures in other Availability Zones and provide inexpensive, low latency network connectivity to other Availability Zones in the same Region. By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location. Regions consist of one or more Availability Zones, are geographically dispersed, and will be in separate geographic areas or countries. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region. Amazon EC2 is currently available in two regions: one in the US and one in Europe.

• Elastic IP Addresses – Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing. An Elastic IP address is associated with your account not a particular instance, and you control that address until you choose to explicitly release it. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, Elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or Availability Zone failures by programmatically remapping your public IP addresses to any instance in your account. Rather than waiting on a data technician to reconfigure or replace your host, or waiting for DNS to propagate to all of your customers, Amazon EC2 enables you to engineer around problems with your instance or software by quickly remapping your Elastic IP address to a replacement instance.

Secure – Amazon EC2 provides web service interfaces to configure firewall settings that control network access to and between groups of instances.

Inexpensive – Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume. Compare this with the significant up-front expenditures traditionally required to purchase and maintain hardware, either in-house or hosted. This frees you from many of the complexities of capacity planning, transforms what are commonly large fixed costs into much smaller variable costs, and removes the need to over-buy “safety net” capacity to handle periodic traffic spikes.

Instance Types

Standard Instances

Instances of this family are well suited for most applications.

• Small Instance (Default) 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform
• Large Instance 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
• Extra Large Instance 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

High-CPU Instances

Instances of this family have proportionally more CPU resources than memory (RAM) and are well suited for compute-intensive applications.

• High-CPU Medium Instance 1.7 GB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 350 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform
• High-CPU Extra Large Instance 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform

EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) – One EC2 Compute Unit (ECU) provides the equivalent CPU capacity of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor.

See Amazon EC2 Pricing for details on costs for each instance type.

See Amazon EC2 Instance Types for a more detailed description of the differences between the available instance types, as well as a complete description of an EC2 Compute Unit.

Operating Systems and Software

Operating Systems

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are preconfigured with an ever-growing list of operating systems. We work with our partners and community to provide you with the most choice possible. You are also empowered to use our bundling tools to upload your own operating systems. The operating systems currently available to use with your Amazon EC2 instances include:

Software

Amazon EC2 enables our partners and customers to build and customize Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with software based on your needs. We have hundreds of free and paid AMIs available for you to use. A small sampling of the software available for use today within Amazon EC2 includes:

Pricing

Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee. Estimate your monthly bill using AWS Simple Monthly Calculator.

Instances

Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance type. Partial instance-hours consumed are billed as full hours.

For more information on Windows options including Windows with Authentication Services and Windows SQL Server, please click here.

Data Transfer

Internet Data Transfer

The pricing below is based on data transferred "in" and "out" of Amazon EC2.

Data transferred between two Amazon Web Services within the same region (i.e. between Amazon EC2 US and another AWS service in the US, or between Amazon EC2 Europe and another AWS service in Europe) is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB). Data transferred between AWS services in different regions will be charged as Internet Data Transfer on both sides of the transfer.

Usage for other Amazon Web Services is billed separately from Amazon EC2.

Availability Zone Data Transfer

• $0.00 per GB – all data transferred between instances in the same Availability Zone using private IP addresses.

Regional Data Transfer

• $0.01 per GB in/out – all data transferred between instances in different Availability Zones in the same region.

Public and Elastic IP Data Transfer

• $0.01 per GB in/out – If you choose to communicate using your Public or Elastic IP address inside of the Amazon EC2 network, you’ll pay Regional Data Transfer rates even if the instances are in the same Availability Zone. For data transfer within the same Availability Zone, you can easily avoid this charge (and get better network performance) by using your private IP whenever possible.

See Availability Zones for tools to describe instance location.

Amazon Elastic Block Store

Elastic IP Addresses

No cost for Elastic IP addresses while in use

• $0.01 per non-attached Elastic IP address per complete hour
• $0.00 per Elastic IP address remap – first 100 remaps / month
• $0.10 per Elastic IP address remap – additional remap / month over 100

(Amazon EC2 is sold by Amazon Web Services LLC.)

Resources

Developer Resources

view all

• WSDL
• Release Notes
• Documentation
• Sample Code & Libraries
• Developer Tools
• Articles & Tutorials
• Amazon Machine Images
• Community Forum
• ElasticFox Getting Started Guide
• AWS hosted public data sets

Additional Product Information

• FAQs
• Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement
• Elastic Block Store
• Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement
• Service Health Dashboard

Related Services

• Amazon DevPay
• AWS Premium Support
• Amazon Simple Storage Service
• Amazon Simple Queue Service

Detailed Description

Using Amazon EC2 to Run Instances

Amazon EC2 allows you to set up and configure everything about your instances from your operating system up to your applications. An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is simply a packaged-up environment that includes all the necessary bits to set up and boot your instance. Your AMIs are your unit of deployment. You might have just one AMI or you might compose your system out of several building block AMIs (e.g., webservers, appservers, and databases). Amazon EC2 provides a number of command line tools to make creating an AMI easy. Once you create a custom AMI, you will need to upload it to Amazon S3. Amazon EC2 uses Amazon S3 to provide reliable, scalable storage of your AMIs so that we can boot them when you ask us to do so.

You can also choose from a library of globally available AMIs that provide useful instances. For example, if you just want a simple Linux server, you can choose one of the standard Linux distribution AMIs. Once you have set up your account and uploaded your AMIs, you are ready to boot your instance. You can start your AMI on any number and any type of instance by calling the RunInstances API. If you wish to run more than 20 instances, create more than 20 EBS volumes or if you feel you need more than 5 Elastic IP addresses, please complete the Amazon EC2 instance request form, Amazon EBS volume request form or the Elastic IP request form and your increase request will be considered.

Paying for What You Use

You will be charged at the end of each month for your EC2 resources actually consumed.

As an example, assume you launch 100 instances of the Small type costing $0.10 per hour at some point in time. The instances will begin booting immediately, but they won’t necessarily all start at the same moment. Each instance will store its actual launch time. Thereafter, each instance will charge for its hours (at $.10/hour) of execution at the beginning of each hour relative to the time it launched. Each instance will run until one of the following occurs: you terminate the instance with the TerminateInstances API call (or an equivalent tool), the instance shuts itself down (e.g. UNIX “shutdown” command), or the host terminates due to software or hardware failure. Partial instance hours consumed are billed as full hours.

Getting Started

The best way to understand Amazon EC2 is to work through the Getting Started Guide, part of our Technical Documentation. Within a few minutes, you will be able to log into your own instance and start playing!

Intended Usage and Restrictions

Your use of this service is subject to the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement