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  1. Stackups
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  5. Amazon EC2 vs OpenShift

Amazon EC2 vs OpenShift

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Stacks48.6K
Followers36.0K
Votes2.5K
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Stacks1.6K
Followers1.4K
Votes517
GitHub Stars885
Forks510

Amazon EC2 vs OpenShift: What are the differences?

Introduction

Amazon EC2 and OpenShift are both cloud computing platforms that offer a range of features and services. However, there are some key differences between the two:

  1. Scalability: Amazon EC2 provides scalability by allowing users to easily add or remove instances as needed. It offers auto-scaling features that can automatically adjust the number of instances based on demand. On the other hand, OpenShift allows for scaling of applications, rather than individual instances. It utilizes containerization technology, such as Docker, to enable horizontal scaling of applications.

  2. Vendor Lock-In: Amazon EC2 is a service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), which means it is tied to the AWS ecosystem. This can result in vendor lock-in, where users may find it challenging to move their infrastructure to another cloud provider. OpenShift, on the other hand, is an open-source platform that can be deployed on various cloud providers, offering more flexibility and preventing vendor lock-in.

  3. Pricing: Amazon EC2 has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users pay for the resources they consume. The pricing structure includes factors such as instance type, storage, and data transfer. OpenShift, on the other hand, offers multiple pricing options. It can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, and the pricing can vary depending on the deployment option chosen.

  4. Managed vs Self-managed: Amazon EC2 is a managed service, where AWS takes care of the underlying infrastructure, including hardware maintenance, security, and updates. Users are responsible for managing their applications and data. OpenShift, on the other hand, can be self-managed or fully managed. Users can choose to deploy and manage OpenShift themselves or opt for a managed OpenShift service offered by certain cloud providers.

  5. Containerization Technology: Amazon EC2 utilizes virtual machine (VM) technology to provide virtualized instances. Users can choose from a range of instance types with different specifications. OpenShift, on the other hand, uses containerization technology, such as Docker and Kubernetes, to provide a platform for deploying and managing applications. Containers offer lightweight and isolated environments, enabling faster deployment and scalability.

  6. Application Deployment Model: Amazon EC2 allows users to deploy a wide range of applications, including both traditional monolithic applications and modern microservices-based applications. OpenShift, on the other hand, is specifically designed for containerized applications. It offers support for microservices architectures and provides features such as service discovery, load balancing, and container orchestration.

In Summary, Amazon EC2 and OpenShift differ in terms of scalability, vendor lock-in, pricing, management, containerization technology, and application deployment model.

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Advice on Amazon EC2, Red Hat OpenShift

Craig
Craig

Principal Consultant at Rootwork InfoTech LLC

Jul 16, 2020

Decided

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.

200k views200k
Comments
Jerome/Zen
Jerome/Zen

Software Engineer

Aug 2, 2020

Needs advice

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.

264k views264k
Comments
Abigail
Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

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.

156k views156k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift

It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.

Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously.;Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine.;Flexible – You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.;Reliable – Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.;Secure – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your compute resources.;Inexpensive – Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume.;Easy to Start – Quickly get started with Amazon EC2 by visiting AWS Marketplace to choose preconfigured software on Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You can quickly deploy this software to EC2 via 1-Click launch or with the EC2 console.
Built-in support for Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java (the standard in today's Enterprise);OpenShift is extensible with a customizable cartridge functionality that allows developers to add any other language they wish. We've seen everything from Clojure to Cobol running on OpenShift;OpenShift supports frameworks ranging from Spring, to Rails, to Play;Autoscaling- OpenShift can scale your application by adding additional instances of your application and enabling clustering. Alternatively, you can manually scale the amount of resources with which your application is deployed when needed;OpenShift by Red Hat is built on open-source technologies (Red Hat Enterprise Linux- RHEL);One Click Deployment- Deploying to the OpenShift platform is as easy a clicking a button or entering a "Git push" command
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
885
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
510
Stacks
48.6K
Stacks
1.6K
Followers
36.0K
Followers
1.4K
Votes
2.5K
Votes
517
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 647
    Quick and reliable cloud servers
  • 515
    Scalability
  • 393
    Easy management
  • 277
    Low cost
  • 271
    Auto-scaling
Cons
  • 14
    Ui could use a lot of work
  • 6
    High learning curve when compared to PaaS
  • 3
    Extremely poor CPU performance
Pros
  • 99
    Good free plan
  • 63
    Open Source
  • 47
    Easy setup
  • 43
    Nodejs support
  • 42
    Well documented
Cons
  • 2
    Decisions are made for you, limiting your options
  • 2
    License cost
  • 1
    Behind, sometimes severely, the upstreams

What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2, Red Hat OpenShift?

Heroku

Heroku

Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean

We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud

Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure

Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine

Google has a reputation for highly reliable, high performance infrastructure. With App Engine you can take advantage of the 10 years of knowledge Google has in running massively scalable, performance driven systems. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow.

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

Linode

Linode

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.

Scaleway

Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

Render

Render

Render is a unified platform to build and run all your apps and websites with free SSL, a global CDN, private networks and auto deploys from Git.

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