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Amazon EC2 vs Packet: What are the differences?
Introduction:
Amazon EC2 and Packet are both cloud computing platforms that offer virtual servers to businesses and individuals. While they share similarities in terms of their purpose, there are key differences between them that make each platform unique and suitable for different use cases.
Billing Model: One of the key differences between Amazon EC2 and Packet is their billing model. Amazon EC2 offers a pay-as-you-go model, where users are charged based on the actual usage of resources. On the other hand, Packet follows a fixed pricing model, where users pay a fixed monthly fee for a specific set of resources, regardless of the actual utilization.
Infrastructure Control: Another significant difference is the level of infrastructure control provided by each platform. Amazon EC2 is a fully managed service, meaning that users have limited control over the underlying infrastructure. In contrast, Packet offers a bare metal infrastructure, allowing users to have complete control over the hardware and software stack, offering higher customization and performance tuning.
Hardware Options: Amazon EC2 provides a wide range of virtual machine instance types that cater to various computing needs, such as general-purpose, memory-optimized, or GPU-accelerated instances. On the other hand, Packet primarily focuses on bare metal servers, offering high-performance hardware with dedicated resources for increased reliability and performance.
Integration with AWS Services: As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) product, Amazon EC2 seamlessly integrates with various other AWS services, such as Amazon S3 for scalable storage or Amazon RDS for managed databases. In contrast, Packet does not have the same level of integration with AWS services, which may impact the ease of building a comprehensive cloud infrastructure.
Global Availability: Being part of AWS, Amazon EC2 has a global presence with data centers distributed across multiple regions worldwide. This allows users to deploy their applications closer to their target audience for lower latency and improved performance. On the other hand, Packet has a more limited availability, with data centers primarily located in North America and Europe.
Community and Support: Amazon EC2 benefits from a large and established community support, with extensive documentation, forums, and tutorials available for users to seek help or share knowledge. Packet, being a smaller and relatively newer player, may have a smaller community and support network, although they still provide customer support to their users.
In summary, Amazon EC2 and Packet differ in their billing models, infrastructure control, hardware options, integration with other services, global availability, and community support. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses, making it essential for users to evaluate their specific requirements before choosing the most suitable platform for their needs.
Our company builds micro saas applications. Based on the application we decide whether to deploy it over one of our shared servers or on a dedicated server.
We decided to Lightsail over EC2.
Lightsail is a lightweight, simplified product offering that has a dramatically simplified console. The instances run in a special VPC, but this aspect is also provisioned automatically, and invisible in the console.
Lightsail supports optionally peering this hidden VPC with your default VPC in the same AWS region, allowing Lightsail instances to access services like EC2 and RDS in the default VPC within the same AWS account.
Bandwidth is unlimited, but of course free bandwidth is not -- however, Lightsail instances do include a significant monthly bandwidth allowance before any bandwidth-related charges apply.
It has predictable pricing with no surprises at the end.
The flexibility of EC2 leads inevitably to complexity. Whereas for Lighsail there is virtually no learning curve, here. You don't even technically need to know how to use SSH with a private key -- the Lightsail console even has a built-in SSH client -- but there is no requirement that you use it. You can access these instances normally, with a standard SSH client.
DigitalOcean was where I began; its USD5/month is extremely competitive and the overall experience as highly user-friendly.
However, their offerings were lacking and integrating with other resources I had on AWS was getting more costly (due to transfer costs on AWS). Eventually I moved the entire project off DO's Droplets and onto AWS's EC2.
One may initially find the cost (w/o free tier) and interface of AWS daunting however with good planning you can achieve highly cost-efficient systems with savings plans, spot instances, etcetera.
Do not dive into AWS head-first! Seriously, don't. Stand back and read pricing documentation thoroughly. You can, not to the fault of AWS, easily go way overbudget. Your first action upon getting your AWS account should be to set up billing alarms for estimated and current bill totals.
We first selected Google Cloud Platform about five years ago, because HIPAA compliance was significantly cheaper and easier on Google compared to AWS. We have stayed with Google Cloud because it provides an excellent command line tool for managing resources, and every resource has a well-designed, well-documented API. SDKs for most of these APIs are available for many popular languages. I have never worked with a cloud platform that's so amenable to automation. Google is also ahead of its competitors in Kubernetes support.
GCE is much more user friendly than EC2, though Amazon has come a very long way since the early days (pre-2010's). This can be seen in how easy it is to edit the storage attached to an instance in GCE: it's under the instance details and is edited inline. In AWS you have to click the instance > click the storage block device (new screen) > click the edit option (new modal) > resize the volume > confirm (new model) then wait a very long time. Google's is nearly instant.
- In both cases, the instance much be shut down.
There also the preference between "user burden-of-security" and automatic security: AWS goes for the former, GCE the latter.
Most bioinformatics shops nowadays are hosting on AWS or Azure, since they have HIPAA tiers and offer enterprise SLA contracts. Meanwhile Heroku hasn't historically supported HIPAA. Rackspace and Google Cloud would be other hosting providers we would consider, but we just don't get requests for them. So, we mostly focus on AWS and Azure support.
Pros of Amazon EC2
- Quick and reliable cloud servers647
- Scalability515
- Easy management393
- Low cost277
- Auto-scaling271
- Market leader89
- Backed by amazon80
- Reliable79
- Free tier67
- Easy management, scalability58
- Flexible13
- Easy to Start10
- Widely used9
- Web-scale9
- Elastic9
- Node.js API7
- Industry Standard5
- Lots of configuration options4
- GPU instances2
- Simpler to understand and learn1
- Extremely simple to use1
- Amazing for individuals1
- All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.1
Pros of Equinix Metal
- Great performance3
- No multi tenancy3
- Fantastic customer support2
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Cons of Amazon EC2
- Ui could use a lot of work14
- High learning curve when compared to PaaS6
- Extremely poor CPU performance3