An Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Instance is a virtualized server providing secure, resizable compute capacity on AWS infrastructure, utilized for running applications without physical hardware maintenance. These instances utilize Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to define operating systems and can be configured with specific virtual hardware resources for general, compute, or memory-optimized tasks. Learn more about setting up an instance via the AWS Management Console . Secure and resizable cloud compute – Amazon EC2 - AWS