Amazon EC2 features

With per-second billing, you only pay for what you use. It takes the cost of unused minutes and seconds in an hour off of the bill, so you can focus on improving your applications instead of maximizing usage to the hour. Learn more about EC2 pricing.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. You can use the dynamic and predictive scaling policies within EC2 Auto Scaling to add or remove EC2 instances. Predictive scaling uses machine learning to proactively allocate instances based on anticipated demand, and dynamic scaling allows you to scale compute based on defined metrics. With EC2 Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you’re using scales up seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. See Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling for more details.

With a single API call, Amazon EC2 Fleet lets you provision compute capacity across EC2 instance types, Availability Zones, and purchase models to help optimize scale, performance and cost. Read FAQs and this AWS blog to learn more. You can also access EC2 Fleet capabilities via Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to provision and automatically scale compute capacity across EC2 instance types, Availability Zones, and purchase options in a single Auto Scaling Group. Learn more.

The Optimize CPUs feature gives you greater control of your Amazon EC2 instances on two fronts. First, you can specify a custom number of vCPUs when launching new instances to save on vCPU-based licensing costs. Second, you can disable Intel Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel HT Technology) for workloads that perform well with single-threaded CPUs, such as certain high-performance computing (HPC) applications. To learn more about how Optimize CPUs can help you, visit the Optimize CPUs documentation here.

You can hibernate your Amazon EC2 instances backed by Amazon EBS, and resume them from this state at a later time. Applications that take a while to bootstrap and persist state into memory (RAM) can benefit from this feature. For more information about hibernation, and supported instance types and operating systems, visit the FAQs.

Different Amazon EC2 workloads can have vastly different storage requirements. Beyond the built-in instance storage, we also offer Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) to suit other cloud storage workload requirements. Amazon EBS provides persistent, highly available, consistent, low-latency block storage volumes for use with Amazon EC2 instances, while Amazon EFS provides simple, scalable, persistent, fully managed cloud file storage for shared access.

Enhanced Networking enables you to get significantly higher packet per second (PPS) performance, lower network jitter and lower latencies. This feature uses a network virtualization stack that provides higher I/O performance and lower CPU utilization compared to traditional implementations. For instructions on how to enable Enhanced Networking on EC2 instances, see the Enhanced Networking on Linux and Enhanced Networking on Windows tutorials. For availability of this feature by instance, or to learn more, visit the Enhanced Networking FAQ section.

Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables customers to run applications requiring high levels of inter-instance communications, like machine learning, computational fluid dynamics, weather modeling, and reservoir simulation, at scale on AWS. EFA is available as an optional EC2 networking feature that you can enable on any supported EC2 instance at no additional cost. Learn more.

Elastic IP addresses are static IP addresses designed for dynamic cloud computing. An Elastic IP address is associated with your account, not with a particular instance, and you control that address until you choose to explicitly release it. Unlike traditional static IP addresses, however, Elastic IP addresses allow you to mask instance or Availability Zone failures by programmatically remapping your public IP addresses to any instance in your account. You can also optionally configure the reverse DNS record of any of your Elastic IP addresses by filling out this form.

Customers with complex computational workloads such as tightly coupled parallel processes, or with applications sensitive to network performance, can achieve the same high compute and network performance provided by custom-built infrastructure while benefiting from the elasticity, flexibility and cost advantages of Amazon EC2. Cluster Compute, Cluster GPU, and High Memory Cluster instances have been specifically engineered to provide high-performance network capability and can be programmatically launched into clusters – allowing applications to get the low-latency network performance required for tightly coupled, node-to-node communication. Cluster instances also provide significantly increased throughput making them well suited for customer applications that need to perform network-intensive operations. Learn more about how Amazon EC2 and other AWS services can be used for HPC Applications.

AWS PrivateLink is a purpose-built technology designed for customers to access Amazon services in a highly performant and highly available manner, while keeping all the network traffic within the AWS network. Learn more about AWS PrivateLink.

Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are preconfigured with an ever-growing list of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows and Linux distributions such as Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, SUSE and Debian. We work with our partners and community to provide you with the most choice possible. The AWS Marketplace features a wide selection of commercial and free software from well-known vendors, designed to run on your EC2 instances.

AWS regularly performs routine hardware, software, power, and network maintenance with minimal disruption across all EC2 instance types. This is achieved by a combination of technologies and methods across the entire AWS Global infrastructure, such as live update and live migration as well as redundant and concurrently maintainable systems. Non-intrusive maintenance technologies such as live update and live migration do not require instances to be stopped or rebooted. Customers are not required to take any action prior to, during or after live migration or live update. These technologies help improve application uptime and reduce your operational effort. Amazon EC2 uses live update to deploy software to servers quickly with minimal impact to customer instances. Live update ensures that customers’ workloads run on servers with software that is up-to-date with security patches, new instance features and performance improvements. Amazon EC2 uses live migration when running instances need to be moved from one server to another for hardware maintenance or to optimize placement of instances or to dynamically manage CPU resources. Amazon EC2 has been expanding the scope and coverage of non-intrusive maintenance technologies over the years so that scheduled maintenance events are a fallback option rather than the primary means of enabling routine maintenance.

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