Learning about Amazon EC2
As you learn in the previous section, Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) is an AWS way of naming servers. It's nothing new, but virtual machines hosted on a physical server reside inside the AWS data center in a secure environment. It is all about standardizing infrastructure's management, security, and growth and building the economy of scale to quickly meet the client demand for their services in minutes and not months. AWS takes full advantage of virtualization technologies and can slice one computer to act like many computers.
Many of their main competitors offer the ability to spin up resources quickly. However, some data center vendors still require users to go through a long cycle, so it can be weeks or months before you can start using the provisioned resources, and it could take just as long to decommission these resources. When you are using AWS, you can shut off access to resources with the same speed and agility as when you requested and...