Short for Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud, Amazon EC2 is a commercial Web service from Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) that lets customers “rent” computing resources from the EC2 cloud. EC2 provides storage, processing, and Web services to customers. EC2 is a virtual computing environment, that enables customers to use Web service interfaces to launch instances with a variety of operating systems, load them with your custom applications, manage your network’s access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you need.