Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is an on demand computing service. It allows customers to rent virtual servers and run custom operating systems and applications on them. EC2 allows scalable deployment of applications, letting customers request an arbitrary number of virtual machines (i.e., instances), on which they can load any software (i.e., images) of their choice. Users are able to create, launch, and terminate server instances on demand, hence the term "elastic". The system allows server instances to be created in zones that are insulated from correlated failures.