Launching Your First EC2 Instance
Walk through the launch wizard, choose an AMI and instance type, configure key pairs, and connect via SSH.
What Is Amazon EC2?
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides resizable virtual machines in the cloud called instances. You choose the operating system, CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity. EC2 is the foundational compute service on AWS—almost every architecture that needs persistent, stateful compute relies on EC2 directly or through services built on top of it (ECS, EKS, EMR). Instances run inside your VPC and can be started, stopped, rebooted, or terminated on demand.
Amazon Machine Images (AMIs)
An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a template that defines the operating system, software, and configuration of an EC2 instance. AWS provides thousands of AMIs (Amazon Linux 2023, Ubuntu, Windows Server), Marketplace vendors publish AMIs with pre-configured software, and you can create your own custom AMIs by capturing a running instance. When you launch an instance, you select an AMI—it determines the root volume content and architecture (x86_64 or ARM).
# Find latest Amazon Linux 2023 AMI in us-east-1
aws ec2 describe-images \
--owners amazon \
--filters 'Name=name,Values=al2023-ami-*-x86_64' \
--query 'sort_by(Images, &CreationDate)[-1].ImageId' \
--output textAll lessons in this course
- Launching Your First EC2 Instance
- Instance Types and Pricing Models
- Security Groups and Key Pairs
- EC2 Storage: Instance Store vs EBS