Which AWS Computing Service is right for you?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Computing Services are the allocation of IT resources for computing, storage, warehousing, networking and databases based on an incurred cost model. Outsourced IT resources are used when an organization requires an extensive and deep platform to build sophisticated, scalable applications on them. There are hundreds of different options available and either one of these or a combination can boost the productivity of an application throughout its lifecycle. Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), EC2 container, Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda, Lightsail and Batch are the different types of AWS compute cloud services. It is important to understand which AWS compute cloud service is right for you among those available.
Adopting cloud computing is beneficial as:
- Organisations can increase business agility because of the main characteristics of cloud or AWS – control through a simple interface, automation tools and pay only for the resources used. The projects can be quickly started, independent of hardware and software installations.
- Convert capital expenses into operational expenses as beforehand investment is not required to build on-premises IT infrastructure. AWS is a transient environment where the user can discard it when the project is finished.
- The on-premises developed apps can be brought into production and the existing workloads can be supplemented with the cloud. You can add analytics to existing applications, improve your compliance posture and improve your DR or recovery environment.
- It can also improve query performance and data warehousing workloads.
- In a reverse hybrid model, the majority of the application is in the cloud, a small part remains on the premises and the two components are integrated.
- Encourages IT migration in the cloud or partial migration when the businesses are large in size with many brands and many websites. This allows running trials, standardising their needs and reducing down time.
The above-mentioned features can help you understand the manner in which AWS compute cloud can be used.
Listed below are some of the “packages” from which you can choose the right one for you:
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – EC2 is the most spoken of computing service that gives the user different pricing options as per the usage of instances.
On-Demand pricing – There are no long term commitments and you pay on an hourly basis. It saves you the pain of planning your usage beforehand.
Reserved instances – They are available at discounted rates for reserved capacity according to an availability zone. The reserve capacity boosts the freedom to use instances.
Spot instances – They can be used in flexible applications as spare compute capacity. C4 and C5 are the compute optimised instance types.
EC2 Container – EC2 allows you to deploy developed scalable applications and manage their containers without servers. It runs on your virtual private cloud and hence you get fine-grained access control over each Docker container. They are most helpful in applications that demand very high security. You end up paying only for the quantity of data you use, transfer, or store.
Elastic Beanstalk – The code is written on a familiar server such as Apache, Passenger, IIS etc and the tool deploys, scales, monitors health, balances load and everything by itself. The service recognizes Java, .NET, PHP, Python and other major languages. It allows you to access and control all types of dormant and active resources while uploading your code. Elastic Beanstalk or EBS, as it is called, is a service specifically designed for developers, so they don’t have to worry about maintaining Infrastructure and can concentrate on what they do best — Write Code. The scaling happens automatically.
Lambda – AWS Lambda keeps you away from the hassle of managing servers so that you can code with a free mind. Another big benefit is that you pay only for the running code.
Lightsail – It is a buffet of virtual machine, static IP address, DN and storage capacity for those who want to immediately launch their project on a virtual private server at a low and data based probable price. It is basically a Virtual Private service to run RDP etc.
AWS Batch – Batch service is used to compute on not one or two, but hundreds of combined AWS platforms. You will pay only for the individual services you use and the resources you are employing, not for the batch.
The comparison of AWS Computing Services is done to give you a clearer picture what’s right for you and depends on your requirement and complexity of computing, the nature of development, migration, standardisation or infrastructural layer. You can either go with one or integrate them according to your requirement or preference.
