Amazon EC2 turns 20: more than 1,200 instance types across 39 Regions

2026-08-25 · Publisher : AWS · Domain : Cloud & DevOps

AWS marks 20 years of Amazon EC2, launched in beta in 2006 with a single instance type in a single Region. The service now counts more than 1,200 instance types across 39 Regions.

### Background On 25 August 2026, AWS publishes a post for the 20th anniversary of Amazon EC2. It recalls that a blog post by Jeff Barr launched the EC2 beta on the same day twenty years earlier: resizable Linux virtual servers billed by the hour, with a single instance type (m1.small) in a single Region (US East). EC2 now counts more than 1,200 instance types, deployed across 39 Regions. ### Key facts - Milestones recalled: Amazon Elastic Block Store (2008); Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon VPC (2009); Nitro System (2017); Graviton processors (2018). - Extensions beyond the Region: AWS Outposts (2018), Local Zones (2019) and Wavelength (2019). - AI silicon: Inferentia (2019), Trainium (Trn1 preview in 2021), Trn2 instances in December 2024 and Trn3 at re:Invent 2025, with up to 144 Trainium3 chips per UltraServer. - Mac instances: first generation in 2020, Mac M1 in 2022, then M4 instances in 2025 and M3 Ultra and M4 Max in 2026. - EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML (2023): reservation of GPU capacity for a future date and a given duration. - Graviton5, presented in preview at re:Invent 2025, has been available since June 2026. ### Why it matters EC2 is the basic building block of the public cloud: its history summarizes the market's trajectory, from the single instance to an offer segmented by workload (compute, memory, storage, accelerators, in-house silicon). For operations teams, the multiplication of instance types raises a topic of choice and cost governance. ### Takeaway Twenty years after its beta, EC2 offers more than 1,200 instance types: cloud infrastructure has become a catalog.

Tags : AWS, Hyperscaler, Cloud, Puces