EC2 - What's left to say?
There's more. EC2 is much more than renting a VM or bare metal server in someone else's data center.
EC2 is the most straightforward AWS product to describe in our #AWSEveryday series, right? I think it's an opportunity to look at what makes AWS fundamentally different than on-premises technology, at least from a technical perspective.
EC2 is a fundamental example of the power of cloud platforms. It's more than the ability to carve up a physical host and divide the capacity across different users and applications. It's about the integration into other services.
I use IAM in this example. Since an EC2 instance has an IAM identity, I can assign rights to the instance or assign the instance rights to other AWS products and services.
This isn't a feature we can easily recreate in the enterprise. How do I enforce the security policy that a serverless code can or can not execute against a virtual machine? It's an inherent part of the AWS architecture.