In-Depth

Will EC2 Instances Still Be Relevant in 2026?

• By Brien Posey
• 11/05/2025

When Amazon launched its AWS cloud service in 2006, EC2 was one of the first services offered. Since that time, EC2, Amazon's solution for hosting virtual machines in the cloud, has become one of Amazon's most popular cloud services. Even so, customers have been increasingly adopting managed services for workloads that would have traditionally been hosted on a virtual machine instance, raising the question of whether virtual machines are still relevant.

Let me just say up front that yes, EC2 will still be relevant in 2026. If nothing else, not every business workload is available as a managed service. This is especially true for workloads that have a dependency on legacy software. Similarly, not every workload is well suited for use with alternative options such as containers.

Although EC2 instances continue to be a viable and very compelling option, both virtual machine instances and managed services have their advantages and disadvantages. Neither is the ideal solution for every workload, nor is either solution outdated and obsolete. The important thing is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of both options so that you can choose the best platform for hosting a given workload.

Complete Control
The main advantage to using EC2 is that EC2 gives you almost complete control over your workload. You can choose the operating system that is used and you have control over the way that the operating system and your application are configured. EC2 instances are extremely flexible, and can be used for production workloads, lab environments, and more. Additionally, in many cases, EC2 instances are less expensive than managed services, particularly for large scale workloads (although there may be situations in which hosting a workload on a managed service saves money).

Just as there are advantages to hosting a workload on an EC2 instance, there can also be advantages to adopting a managed service. One of the biggest advantages to using a managed service is simplicity. Because Amazon offers these services as managed, you don't have to worry about the low level configuration. Amazon ensures that the services are stable and reliable and that the services are deployed and configured according to established best practices. Additionally, Amazon handles much of the maintenance associated with the managed services. For example, you don't have to worry about patch management, because Amazon handles the patching process for all of their managed services.

Another advantage to adopting managed services is that these services are designed for scalability and for high availability. While you can certainly scale EC2-based workloads and there are ways of making such workloads highly available, managed services free you from having to build the underlying infrastructure or manually scale workloads. All of that usually happens behind the scenes as a part of the managed service offering.

Still another reason why so many organizations are gravitating toward managed services is that managed services are built with security in mind. While you can undoubtedly harden an EC2 instance to make it secure, Amazon invests heavily into making sure that its managed services are secure. In other words, you don't have to spend time figuring out how to make a managed service secure, because Amazon has already done that for you.

Managed Service Drawbacks
In spite of all of their benefits, there are some drawbacks to using managed services. For example, managed services give you very limited control over your workloads. Amazon goes to great lengths to make sure that managed services are secure, stable, and reliable, but this comes at the price of not having access to low level configuration settings.

Another potential disadvantage to using a managed service is vendor lock. When you host a workload on a virtual machine, there are any number of different ways that you could potentially migrate that workload to another platform. In the case of managed services however, migrating to a competing service might not always be a straightforward or easy process.

One more potential disadvantage to using a managed service is that the costs are not always predictable. If you are running a workload on a virtual machine instance, then it is relatively easy to predict the monthly cost associated with running the virtual machine. In contrast, managed services can dynamically scale based on demand, making the cost a bit more difficult to predict.

When for Which?
So when should you use an EC2 instance and when should you opt for a managed service instead? An EC2 instance is your best option in situations in which you need granular control over the workload or need the flexibility to make modifications. EC2 instances are also a good fit if you need to host a legacy application or if no suitable managed service exists. EC2 instances also tend to be the best option for dev / test environments.

Conversely, managed services tend to be the best option if you don't want to be bothered with workload related maintenance tasks. Managed services are also a good fit for workloads that need to be highly available or that need to scale to meet demand spikes.