AWS EC2 — Complete Beginner Guide (Instances, Pricing, Use Cases)
What Is EC2?
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides virtual servers known as instances. It allows you to run applications without managing physical hardware.
Types of EC2 Instances
- General Purpose: t3, t4g
- Compute Optimized: c6i
- Memory Optimized: r6g
- GPU Instances: p4, g5
- Storage Optimized: i4
EC2 Pricing Models
On-Demand
Pay per second/hour. Most flexible but expensive.
Reserved Instances
Commit 1–3 years. Up to 72% cheaper.
Spot Instances
Use AWS unused capacity. Up to 90% cheaper. Best for batch jobs & ML training.
Key EC2 Features
- Security Groups
- EBS Block Storage
- Elastic Load Balancing
- Auto Scaling
When to Use EC2?
- Web applications
- Backend APIs
- Gaming servers
- Databases
- Machine learning workloads
Conclusion
EC2 is a core AWS service. Knowing its pricing and instance types is essential for cloud beginners.
