Amazon EC2 is a general-purpose virtual server platform with broad instance choices and direct control over the instance from launch through termination. AWS describes EC2 as resizable compute capacity where customers choose operating systems, instance types, networking, storage, and the surrounding AWS services they need.12 AgentVM is intentionally not trying to reproduce that full cloud surface.3
Instead, AgentVM is a managed gateway for a narrower use case: give an agent a bounded server without making raw cloud-account credentials the agent's interface.
EC2 is the stronger primitive when you need AWS depth
EC2 offers a vast set of instance families and integrates with the rest of AWS networking, IAM, storage, observability, security, and managed services. Customers retain direct control of the instance lifecycle and can customize the operating system and applications.12
For long-lived production infrastructure, custom VPC design, specialized hardware, reserved capacity strategies, or deep AWS integration, going directly to EC2 is usually the more powerful choice.
AgentVM reduces the number of cloud decisions exposed to the agent
AgentVM publishes a bounded catalog and keeps provider credentials in its managed control plane. The user or harness selects an approved plan, region, image, SSH key, and runtime rather than constructing an AWS account and IAM policy model for every agent job.3
That narrower surface is intentional. It reduces flexibility, but it also reduces the amount of provider-specific authority an autonomous workload needs in order to get a computer.
Runtime and payment boundaries are part of the AgentVM request
EC2 bills instances according to AWS's service pricing and gives customers the tools to stop or terminate resources, but the account owner is responsible for the automation and policy that enforces a particular agent's spending and lifetime.1
AgentVM makes maximum runtime and prepaid or MPP purchase behavior part of the agent-facing provisioning flow.34 That is useful when the task should be economically bounded before the machine exists.
Multi-provider abstraction is a tradeoff
AgentVM's control plane can represent compute from Hetzner, AWS, and OVH integrations behind one product surface.3 This is useful when the application wants to treat provider selection as catalog policy rather than build separate cloud SDK integrations.
The tradeoff is that AgentVM cannot expose every EC2 feature without becoming EC2 itself. If your workload depends on a specific AWS network topology, accelerator, storage mode, or IAM integration, direct EC2 remains the better layer.
Choose raw cloud or choose delegation
Choose EC2 when your team wants maximum infrastructure control and is prepared to own AWS accounts, IAM, networking, billing policy, and lifecycle automation directly.
Choose AgentVM when the goal is to delegate a constrained server to an agent with ordinary SSH access, a hard lifetime, managed provider credentials, and an optional machine-payment flow.