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The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) web service provides you with the ability to execute your applications in Amazon's computing environment.
To use Amazon EC2 you simply:
Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing all your software, including your operating system and associated configuration settings, applications, libraries, etc. Think of this as zipping up the contents of your hard drive. We provide all the necessary tools to create and package your AMI.
Upload this AMI to the Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) service. This gives us reliable, secure access to your AMI.
Register your AMI with Amazon EC2. This allows us to verify that your AMI has been uploaded correctly and to allocate a unique identifier for it.
Use this AMI ID and the Amazon EC2 web service APIs to run, monitor, and terminate as many instances of this AMI as required. Currently, we provide command line tools and Java libraries, and you may also directly access our SOAP or Query based APIs.
You can also skip the first three steps and choose to launch an AMI that is provided by Amazon or shared by another user.
While instances are running, you are billed for the computing and network resources that they consume.
![[Note]](images/note.png) | Note |
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| Currently, only systems based on the Linux 2.6 kernel are explicitly supported. |
This guide will refer to the following concepts:
Amazon Machine Image (AMI) - An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is an encrypted file stored in Amazon S3. It contains all the information necessary to boot instances of your software.
Instance - The running system based on an AMI is referred to as an instance. All instances based on the same AMI begin executing identically. Any information on them is lost when the instances are terminated or if they fail.
