EC2 in AWS is the ability to rent virtual machines in AWS. You can configure several things such as networking, storage, ram, CPU etc. You can even bootstrap, run commands from a script right when the machine first boots up, using the user data script to configure the machine at boot such as installing updates and downloading necessary files from the internet. You also have access to EBS, Elastic Block Store, for storing data on virtual drive. You have the ability to use ELB, Elastic Load Balancing to balance applications and data across your machines. ASG, Auto-Scaling Group, allows your EC2 infrastructure to expand as needed. I will go into more detail in future posts the main point is EC2 is in incredibly powerful tool and it’s no wonder it’s one of AWS’s most popular offerings.