What is EC2? EC2 stands for “Elastic Compute Cloud”. To understand the value of EC2, you have to understand what existed before this service existed.
In the past, companies that hosted software had to buy or rent either physical servers or virtual machines running on a physical server. In either case, companies had to plan well in advance the capacity they would need. Setting up a physical server and plugging it into the network, administering it, etc, was a time-consuming process. Virtual machines were faster but limited in terms of performance.
EC2 allows companies to provision new computing resources and servers without the extensive lead time. This is not only a huge sunk cost and headache saver but also very valuable for companies that have heavy bursts of traffic. If you were a company (such as a retailer) who had 90% of their traffic at a single point in the year, then you had to pay the cost of setting up 10x your normal traffic needs while having them stay mostly dormant the rest of the year. With EC2 and similar services, this is no longer the case and this is why cloud adoption by the enterprise is so strong.
Understanding why companies move to EC2 is critical because it’s all around costs, flexibility, and responsiveness.
