What type of service is Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, is classified as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This service allows users to provision and manage virtual machines, providing a variety of instance types, configurations, and operating systems to meet diverse computing needs. With EC2, customers have control over the underlying hardware, including CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources, which they can scale up or down according to their application demands.

In contrast to PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings, which provide a platform for developers to build and deploy applications without managing the underlying infrastructure, EC2 gives users flexibility and control over their entire computing environment. PaaS services abstract away much of the infrastructure management, which is not the case with EC2.

Additionally, EC2 is not a managed database service, which would offer database capabilities without the need for users to handle the underlying servers or database software. It is also distinctly different from a content delivery network (CDN), which focuses on delivering web content to users with low latency by distributing that content across various geographical locations.