Elastic Compute Cloud

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is Amazon Web Services's flagship Infrastructure as a Service offering, launched in 2006 and widely credited with defining the modern cloud computing market. EC2 provides resizable virtual machine instances that customers can provision, configure, and terminate through APIs, transforming server capacity from a capital asset into a metered utility. The service introduced concepts — instance types, AMI images, security groups, elastic IP addresses — that became the de facto vocabulary of cloud infrastructure, though competitors have since eroded AWS's first-mover advantage through lower pricing and simpler interfaces. The systems lesson of EC2 is that abstraction can create markets: by hiding the data center behind a virtual machine API, Amazon turned physical infrastructure into a liquid commodity.