Amazon EC2 provides two APIs: Using the SOAP API and Using the Query API, which allow you to launch and control instances from your own applications.

This section discusses the operations available in the Amazon EC2 APIs, their semantics, and their required parameters. Examples of requests and responses are also provided.

	Note
	The same XML body is returned in both the Query API and SOAP API.

Before using the API, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with their API Conventions.