Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Getting Started Guide

This is official Amazon Web Services (AWS) documentation for Amazon Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

This guide steps you through using the Amazon EC2 web service for the first time. You’ll learn how to sign up for the Amazon EC2 service, launch an instance of a Linux virtual server in the cloud, connect to that instance, and then terminate it. You'll work with the AWS Management Console, an easy-to-use web-based interface. For information on getting started launching a Windows virtual server, see the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Microsoft Windows User Guide.

Amazon EC2 provides resizable computing capacity—literally, server instances in Amazon's data centers—that you use to build and host your software systems.