Amazon Web Services AWS

AWS - a collection of on-demand services for building websites n apps that can scale up to meet very high loads.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - primary Amazon service, provides virtual servers (known as instances).
Each instance is created from a prebuilt copy, known as Amazon Machine Image (AMI),
using AMI, no need to install OS each time, but simply reuse a preconfigured copy.

remark: various AMIs out there. e.g. those created by Alestic (http://alestic.com)

EC2 relies on Elastic Block Service (EBS) to provide data storage. EBS provide virtual disk drives for server.

EBS may sometimes found unresponsive, in this case, need to reboot instance

AWS website: http://aws.amazon.com