Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

With Amazon EC2, you can launch virtual servers, called instances, which are pre-configured with a specific operating system and other software. You can choose from a variety of instance types, each with a different combination of resources such as CPU, memory, and storage.

You can use Amazon EC2 to run applications that are designed to be scalable and highly available. You can also use it to host websites, deploy databases, run big data analytics workloads, and much more.

Amazon EC2 is part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing platform, which also includes services such as Amazon S3 (object storage), Amazon RDS (relational database service), and Amazon Lambda (serverless compute).