What is the purpose of EC2 instances in cloud infrastructure?

EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a service of Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provides virtual servers (instances) in the cloud. The main purpose of EC2 instances is to launch and manage computing resources that can be used for hosting applications, web services, databases, and other tasks.

Advantages of EC2 instances:

• Scalability: you can quickly start and stop instances as needed.
• Flexibility: choice of different instance types with various CPU, memory, and disk characteristics.
• Pay-as-you-go pricing.

Example of use: launching a web application on an EC2 instance, where the server handles user requests.

Thus, EC2 instances serve as virtual machines in the cloud for performing any computational tasks.