About
Amazon EC2 is a cloud compute service that provides resizable virtual server capacity for running workloads on AWS. It offers instance-based compute with choices across processor families, storage, networking, operating systems, and purchase models.
The service is used for cloud-native and enterprise applications, HPC workloads, Apple platform development with EC2 Mac instances, and machine learning training and deployment. The pricing page highlights On-Demand Instances, Savings Plans, Spot Instances, On-Demand Capacity Reservations, Capacity Blocks for ML, Dedicated Hosts, and per-second billing with a 60-second minimum.
- Resizable virtual server capacity
- Over 1000 instance types
- 99.99% availability SLA commitment
- Per-second billing with 60-second minimum
- Spot Instances up to 90% discount
- Savings Plans up to 72% savings
- 400 Gbps Ethernet networking
- EC2 Mac instances for Apple workloads
Free Tier Value
This free tier is an intro-style offer with a monthly cap, not an uncapped forever-free plan. Using AWS's own paid rates, the included micro-instance hours are worth about $8.50/month and the included EBS storage adds about $3.12/month, for a conservative total of roughly $11.62/month. A credit card is required to create the account, which adds friction, but the recurring monthly allowance and broad instance/OS coverage keep the value strong.
What's included in the free tier
- Amazon EC2 free tier access with no-cost usage for eligible new accounts.
- Up to 750 hours per month of t2.micro or t3.micro instances, depending on Region.
- Access to Linux, Windows, or other eligible micro instances included in the free tier.
- Up to 30 GB of EBS storage included for free tier instance volumes.
- Up to 2 million I/O requests for EBS included in the free tier.
- Up to 1 GB of snapshot storage included for EBS backups.
See Amazon EC2 pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
On-Demand Instances
- compute time
- per hour or second
- minimum billing increment
- 60 seconds
- No upfront payment
- No long-term commitment
- Billed by the hour or second
- Available across Regions and Availability Zones
Savings Plan
- discount
- up to 72%
- Commitment-based discounting
- Can reduce bill versus On-Demand
- Applies to compute usage
Spot Instances
- discount
- up to 90%
- Uses spare EC2 capacity
- Discounted compute option
- Good for flexible workloads
On-Demand Capacity Reservations
- capacity reservation
- specific Availability Zone
- Reserve compute capacity in advance
- Access capacity when needed
- Useful for business-critical events
- Useful for high-availability requirements
- Useful for disaster recovery
Amazon EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML
- capacity block
- GPU instances
- Reserve GPU instances in advance
- Designed for ML training and fine-tuning
- Useful for experiments and prototypes
- Useful for demand spikes
Dedicated Hosts
- billing
- hourly
- Physical server dedicated for your use
- Supports server-bound software licenses
- Can be purchased hourly
- Can be purchased with Savings Plans
Pricing extracted from Amazon EC2's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.