Building and running your business starts with compute, whether you are building mobile apps, or running massive clusters to sequence the human genome. AWS has over 70 infrastructure services and plans to deliver more than 1,000 new features in 2016. With more than twice as many compute instance families, twice the compliance certifications, and the largest global footprint of any other cloud vendor, AWS provides a robust and scalable platform to help organizations of all types and sizes innovate quickly.
AWS offers multiple compute products allowing you to deploy, run, and scale your applications as virtual servers, containers, or code.
| If You Need To.... | Customer Management Responsibilities | Deployment Unit | Consider Using |
|---|---|---|---|
| Run simple applications and websites on one or a few servers for a low, predictable price. |
|
Virtual Private Server (Instance) | Amazon Lightsail |
| Run any application. Control and manage server or cluster level functions such as scaling and deployment. |
|
Virtual Machines |
Amazon EC2 |
Run stateless or stateful applications packaged as Docker containers |
|
Containers | Amazon ECS |
Run event-initiated, stateless applications that need quick response times |
|
Code |
AWS Lambda |
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is flexible service that provides resizable cloud-based compute capacity in the form of EC2 instances, which are equivalent to virtual servers. You can commission one or thousands of instances simultaneously, and pay only for what you use, making web-scale cloud computing easy. We provide a broad range of instance types optimized to fit different use cases, and choice in how you pay for instances, so you can optimize your application based on business needs while minimizing costs.
Common Use Cases:
- Big data (e.g. Hadoop, Spark)
- Database software (e.g., Aurora, DynamoDB)
- Enterprise applications (e.g., SAP, Oracle, Sharepoint)
- Migrations from on-premises environments, including BYOL
- Open-source cluster management
Amazon Lightsail is the easiest way to launch and manage a virtual private server with AWS. Lightsail includes everything you need to jumpstart your project – a virtual machine, SSD-based storage, data transfer, DNS management, and a static IP – for a low, predictable price. Launch in seconds with preconfigured operating system and application images and manage your resources easily from our intuitive console. When your app needs advanced features like managed databases, content delivery network, or any of dozens of other features, you can connect these additional AWS services to your Lightsail server. Lightsail plans start at only $5 per month.
Common Use Cases:
- Simple Web Applications
- WordPress Blogs and Websites
- Ecommerce Websites
- Single-server Business Software
Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) is a highly scalable, high performance container management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon ECS eliminates the need for you to install, operate, and scale your own cluster management infrastructure.
Common Use Cases:
- Web applications
- Microservices
- Batch jobs
- Docker workloads
AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from other AWS services or call it directly from any web or mobile app.
Common Use Cases:
- Web applications
- Mobile backends
- IoT backends
- Stream processing workloads
- File processing workloads
