Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute instances in the cloud. Amazon EC2 provides the following features:

• On-demand delivery of IT resources via the Internet
• Provisioning of as many instances as you like
• Payment for the hours during which you use instances, such as your utility bill
• No setup cost, no installation, and no overhead at all
• Shutting down or terminating instances when you no longer need them
• Making such instances available on familiar operating systems

EC2 provides different types of instances to meet all your compute needs, such as general-purpose instances, microinstances, memory-optimized instances, storage-optimized instances, and others. They also have a Free Tier of microinstances for trial purposes.