Manage your Amazon EC2 resources - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Manage your Amazon EC2 resources

A resource is an entity that you can work with. Amazon EC2 creates resources as you use the features of the service. For example, Amazon EC2 resources include images, instances, fleets, key pairs, and security groups. All Amazon EC2 resource types include attributes that describe the resources. For example, names, descriptions, resource identifiers, and Amazon Resource Names (ARN).

Amazon EC2 resources are specific to the Amazon Region or zone in which they reside. For example, an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is specific to an Amazon Region, but the instance that you launch from an AMI is specific to the zone in which you launch it. You can specify an Amazon EC2 resource in a permissions policy using its ARN.

Your Amazon Web Services account has default quotas for Amazon EC2. These quotas define the maximum number of resources that you can create. For example, there are quotas for the maximum number of vCPUs across your running instances. If launching an instance or starting a stopped instance would cause you to exceed your quota, the operation fails.

You can search for specific resources in your Amazon Web Services account by Region, using resource IDs or tags. To search for specific resources or resource types across multiple Regions, use Amazon EC2 Global View.