Product overview — Cloud Compute High

AWS EC2

General-purpose virtual machines on AWS for teams that need full control over runtime, networking, and scaling patterns.

Sources linked — see verification below.

Freshness & verification

Last updated 2026-02-09 Intel generated 2026-02-06 3 sources linked

Who is this best for?

This is the fastest way to decide whether AWS EC2 is in the right neighborhood.

Best for
  • 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
  • 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

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.

  1. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ ↗
  2. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ ↗
  3. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ec2/ ↗