The Word EC2 it is came from Elastic Compute Cloud. Here the virtual machine concept getting real-time analysis. Now after breakdown the word ec2 E = Elastic is means that resizeable compute capacity if we need a simple virtual server with 1 cpu, 1gb ram & 1 disk. Now if in future we need to increase the configuration of our virtual machine then we can increase it as per our requirement. C = Compute is a services that known as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) which are available around of each country and regions offers a virtual server and storage and APIs over the internet that helps us to handle workloads on a virtual machine. Also we have the power to start, stop, terminate and configure our computer resources as per our requirements. C = Cloud is a the resource that we can get over the internet and the cloud vendors offers it. The Amazon Web Service provide us Compute as a service in a virtual server.
In one line AWS Ec2 is a virtual machine which is resizable compute model that what ec2 is.
Benefits of Ec2 Instances or virtual server from cloud vendors : Physical server users when the offer runs on before a festival days on these days on a particular shopping app like Amazon.com the traffic should be in spike on that time physical servers needs autoscaling facility they are needed timely ugradation, solving of security glitches and downtime handlling in one word maintainance and upscaling. And those servers comes with large amount of config in one server so they charging the same amount for using one or hundred. They So those are really tough for couple of devops engineers or system admins to handle all these and it is really cost-intensive if it is in small scale. So benefits of using a public cloud vendor's AWS Ec2 instance (virtual server) it is manage and maintaince by AWS or public cloud provider and due to the vendors spreded all over the globe in large scale so the cost became lower to them. And it allows users to start and stop according to their requirements.
Types of Ec2 instances :
General Purpose Instances.
Compute Optimized Instances.
Memory-Optimized Instances.
Storage Optimized Instances.
Accelerated Computing Instances.
AWS Region & Availability zones(az) :
Aws have their data-centres over the globe in multiple location and this thing is called Aws Regions. And aws allow us to request server from the any regions specially where the client from or the nearest location or region inside of it there are multiple availabilty zones (az's) cause it faces less latency and getting server request in snap.