Welcome

This is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud API Reference. This guide provides detailed information about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) actions, data types, parameters, and errors. For detailed information about Amazon EC2 features and their associated API calls, go to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud User Guide.

Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides resizeable computing capacity—literally, server instances in Amazon's data centers—that you use to build and host your software systems. With Amazon EC2, you can get access to infrastructure resources using APIs or web tools and utilities.

	Note
	This guide also includes the actions for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). For more information about the service, go to the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud User Guide.

This reference has a single set of topics for both the Query and SOAP APIs (the actions are the same for both APIs). The topic for a given action shows the Query API request parameters. The XML request elements for the SOAP API have names that are very similar to the Query API parameter names. You can view the XML request elements in the WSDL, or look at the proxy classes that a SOAP toolkit generates from the WSDL. Therefore you can look at the topic for a given action and see what you need to provide for either the Query API or the SOAP API. You can also see what the XML response looks like (it's the same for both APIs).