In this video I break down what an Amazon EC2 actually is, from the perspective of a back-end engineer who uses AWS every day. AWS is basically about renting resources—systems, machines, processes—so you can run your applications in the cloud without owning the hardware. The most fundamental thing you can rent is an EC2, which stands for Elastic Compute Cloud (yes, two C’s). At the end of the day, an EC2 is just a computer that Amazon owns that you can use to run your code or processes. I also unpack the acronym so it’s less intimidating: “elastic” means it’s flexible—you can change the specs and scale the number of machines up or down whenever you need. “compute” means it’s literally a machine that can compute things. And “cloud” means it lives in the Amazon Cloud. Then I put EC2 in context with the rest of AWS: a lot of services are built on top of EC2, but they abstract away the underlying machines (think Lambda, Fargate, DynamoDB), which is why you often don’t have to manage servers directly. EC2 gives you the most customization, but it also comes with the most setup and maintenance—so it’s one option, not the only way to run code on AWS.