Best for — Cloud Compute
•
High
Who is AWS EC2 best for?
Quick fit guide: Who is AWS EC2 best for, who should avoid it, and what typically forces a switch.
Sources linked — see verification below.
Freshness & verification
Best use cases for AWS EC2
- Teams needing VM-level control and custom runtime requirements
- Organizations aligned to AWS identity/networking/governance
- Workloads that don’t fit serverless/PaaS constraints
- Teams that can standardize images, patching, and scaling practices across services
- Enterprise environments that need IAM, networking, and policy controls to be first-class
Who should avoid AWS EC2?
- You want minimal infra ownership and fastest time-to-ship
- You prefer simple, predictable monthly pricing without optimization effort
- You can’t commit to an owner for patching, hardening, and incident response for VM workloads
- Your app is a standard web service that fits a managed platform with fewer moving parts
Upgrade triggers for AWS EC2
- Need enterprise governance across many accounts/teams
- Need specialized instance shapes for performance or cost reasons
- Need deeper control over networking and runtime
- Need private networking patterns, advanced routing, and tighter security controls
- Need standardized infrastructure practices across multiple teams/services
Sources & verification
Pricing and behavioral information comes from public documentation and structured research. When information is incomplete or volatile, we prefer to say so rather than guess.