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Amazon EC2 vs Jelastic: What are the differences?
<Amazon EC2 vs Jelastic>
1. **Pricing Model**: Amazon EC2 charges users based on the resources consumed, such as compute capacity, data transfer, and storage. In contrast, Jelastic utilizes a pay-as-you-go pricing model where users only pay for the resources utilized without any upfront commitments or long-term contracts, making it more cost-effective for variable workloads.
2. **Resource Flexibility**: Amazon EC2 provides users with the ability to customize virtual machines (VMs) by selecting specific CPU, memory, and storage configurations. On the other hand, Jelastic offers a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution with auto-scaling capabilities, allowing users to effortlessly adjust resources based on application demands without manual intervention, providing greater flexibility and scalability.
3. **Application Deployment**: Amazon EC2 requires users to manage the deployment of applications onto their virtual servers, including setting up environments and configuring software dependencies. Conversely, Jelastic simplifies application deployment by offering pre-configured containers and one-click deployment options, streamlining the process and reducing deployment time significantly.
4. **Managed Services**: Amazon EC2 primarily focuses on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings, requiring users to handle server management tasks such as security patching, monitoring, and backups. In contrast, Jelastic provides a managed hosting platform with built-in support for automatic updates, monitoring, and troubleshooting, relieving users of the burden of managing infrastructure and allowing them to focus on developing their applications.
5. **Scalability**: Amazon EC2 allows users to manually scale resources by adding or removing VM instances based on demand, requiring proactive monitoring and adjustments. Meanwhile, Jelastic offers automated horizontal scaling capabilities, which dynamically adjust resource allocation based on application load, ensuring optimal performance and resource utilization without user intervention.
6. **Multi-Cloud Support**: Jelastic supports multi-cloud deployments, allowing users to seamlessly migrate and run their applications across different cloud providers to prevent vendor lock-in and optimize performance and cost efficiency. In contrast, Amazon EC2 is predominantly tied to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem, limiting flexibility for users who desire a multi-cloud strategy or require specific cloud provider features.
In Summary, Amazon EC2 and Jelastic differ in pricing models, resource flexibility, application deployment processes, managed services, scalability options, and multi-cloud support capabilities.
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 Jelastic
- Automatic scaling13
- Managed hosting12
- Pay-per-Use on an hourly basis12
- Constantly evolving8
- Multiple hosting providers6
- Full automatic vertical and horizontal scaling5
- High availability5
- SSH access5
- Jenkins3
- Great support3
- Easy to use2
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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