EC2 is an Amazon cloud computing platform, which defines its own management interface. Although not codified as an open standard, it is widely used due to the popularity of the Amazon service, and subsets of it are implemented by various other cloud management frameworks. This makes it a widely used de-facto standard (or industrial standard).

The main disadvantage of EC2 when compared to open standards such as OCCI (Open Cloud Computing Interface) is the fact that it is subject to frequent one-sided modifications, which complicates maintenance of other EC2-(partly-)compliant products.