Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides resizable virtual servers called instances. You choose the operating system, size and configuration, and you get full control, including administrator or root access. Under the shared responsibility model that control means you are responsible for patching and securing the guest operating system, configuring security groups and managing the software you install. EC2 is infrastructure as a service (IaaS): AWS runs the hardware and virtualization, and you run everything above it.
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