Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon EC2 API provisions and manages virtual machine instances — the core IaaS service in AWS.
Instance types span CPU / memory / GPU / network optimized
Boot time spans tens of seconds to minutes — not for instant scaling
Create IAM credentials in the AWS Console or CLI; call EC2.runInstances via SDK. For production, manage with Terraform, CDK, or CloudFormation.
Uptime · 30-day window
GitHub activity
About this API
EC2 launched in 2006 as one of the first AWS services, providing on-demand VM compute. Developers create instances, attach security groups and EBS volumes, set user-data init scripts via API and SSH into a server within tens of seconds. Instance types span general-purpose, compute-, memory-, GPU-, and ARM-optimized families, billed hourly (or per-second on Linux).
EC2 with Auto Scaling, ELB, and VPC forms the backbone of traditional cloud architecture. Spot instances tap AWS spare capacity at 10–30% of on-demand pricing, with forced reclamation risk — ideal for fault-tolerant batch work. The recent trend is moving stateless workloads to Lambda or ECS Fargate, keeping EC2 for long-running jobs, stateful services, and self-managed Kubernetes.
What you can build
- 1Spin up ephemeral EC2 instances for batch jobs
- 2Build auto-scaling groups for traffic spikes
- 3Distribute standard server images via AMIs
- 4Provide compute for long-running jobs Lambda cannot serve
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Instance types span CPU / memory / GPU / network optimized
- Deep integration across AWS
- Spot instances cut cost up to 90%
Limitations
- Boot time spans tens of seconds to minutes — not for instant scaling
- Operational overhead (patching, scaling) is higher than serverless
Getting started
Create IAM credentials in the AWS Console or CLI; call EC2.runInstances via SDK. For production, manage with Terraform, CDK, or CloudFormation.
FAQ
Is there an EC2 free tier?+
First 12 months: 750 hours/month of t2.micro or t3.micro. Production workloads are paid.
Spot vs On-Demand?+
Spot suits fault-tolerant batch workloads at lower cost; On-Demand or Savings Plans suit stable production services.
How do I auto-configure an instance at launch?+
Use user-data scripts for one-shot setup, or layer on Systems Manager / Ansible / config-management tools for ongoing config.
Technical details
- Auth type
- api_key
- Pricing
- paid
- Protocols
- REST
- SDKs
- python, javascript, java, go, ruby, csharp
- Response time
- 43 ms
- Last health check
- 6/26/2026, 6:22:15 AM
Endpoints
Parsed from the OpenAPI spec. Showing 12 of 1182 non-deprecated endpoints.
/#Action=AcceptAddressTransfer/#Action=AcceptAddressTransfer/#Action=AcceptReservedInstancesExchangeQuote/#Action=AcceptReservedInstancesExchangeQuote/#Action=AcceptTransitGatewayMulticastDomainAssociations/#Action=AcceptTransitGatewayMulticastDomainAssociations/#Action=AcceptTransitGatewayPeeringAttachment/#Action=AcceptTransitGatewayPeeringAttachment/#Action=AcceptTransitGatewayVpcAttachment/#Action=AcceptTransitGatewayVpcAttachment/#Action=AcceptVpcEndpointConnections/#Action=AcceptVpcEndpointConnections1170 more endpoints not shown. See the OpenAPI spec for the full list.
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