Amazon Web Service EC2 - the virtual machine provided by Amazon - also called instances, has many advantages. First of all, it provides a highly scalable computing capacity. They are easy to start and stop. And they provide options to choose among the different type of operating systems. It eliminates the need for upfront investment on the hardware, and you can develop and deploy applications on Amazon servers faster. You are given the flexibility to launch as many EC2 servers as per your requirements and configure aspects like - security, networking and storage - as per your liking.