Cloud computing provides on-demand access to computing resources and applications via the internet. There are different types of cloud services and deployment models. Key cloud characteristics include on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, and rapid elasticity. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a major public cloud provider that operates across multiple regions and availability zones to provide scalable infrastructure to customers. AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows customers to launch virtual server instances from machine images to run applications.