EC2 stands for Elastic Compute Cloud. It is the equivalent of a virtual machine. A virtual machine in AWS is known as an EC2 instance. Here is an excerpt of the EC2 features: Virtual computing environments, known as instances Preconfigured templates for your instances, known as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) , that package the bits you need for your server (including the operating system and additional software) Various configurations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity for your instances, known as instance types Secure login information for your instances using key pairs (AWS stores the public key, and you store the private key in a secure place) Storage volumes for temporary data that's deleted when you stop or terminate your instance, known as instance store volumes Persist...