Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

With a start of operations in March 2006, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) allows customers was the first to market. It runs on the infrastructure that runs Amazon.com's electronic storefronts, both for Amazon itself and third parties.

EC2 allows virtual appliances to be built from choices among operating systems, data bases, web servers, etc. Amazon offers a variety of preconfigured stacks called Amazon Machine Images (AMI), such as: