EC2
In plain terms
Amazon's service for renting virtual servers in the cloud.
Going deeper
EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) provides resizable virtual machines you launch on demand, the foundational AWS compute service. You pick instance types and pay per use.
Under the hood
Many instance families (compute/memory/GPU optimized); pairs with auto-scaling and load balancers.
Examples
Web servers, app hosting, batch jobs, custom workloads, scalable compute.
Think of it like...
Like renting computers by the hour that you can spin up or shut down anytime.