The document discusses the historical evolution and functionality of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that allows customers to rent virtual servers by the hour. It traces trends in computing from shared utility computing concepts in the 1960s to modern virtualization techniques, highlighting various EC2 instance types and storage solutions. Additionally, it provides a step-by-step guide for getting started with EC2, along with details on the virtualization technologies and storage options used by Amazon Web Services (AWS).