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Amazon EC2 vs s3-lambda: What are the differences?

What is Amazon EC2? Scalable, pay-as-you-go compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

What is s3-lambda? Lambda functions over S3 objects: each, map, reduce, filter. s3-lambda enables you to run lambda functions over a context of S3 objects. It has a stateless architecture with concurrency control, allowing you to process a large number of files very quickly. This is useful for quickly prototyping complex data jobs without an infrastructure like Hadoop or Spark.

Amazon EC2 belongs to "Cloud Hosting" category of the tech stack, while s3-lambda can be primarily classified under "Big Data Tools".

s3-lambda is an open source tool with 1.06K GitHub stars and 43 GitHub forks. Here's a link to s3-lambda's open source repository on GitHub.

Decisions about Amazon EC2 and s3-lambda
Jerome/Zen Quah
Shared insights
on
Amazon EC2Amazon EC2DigitalOceanDigitalOcean

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.

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Craig Finch
Principal Consultant at Rootwork InfoTech · | 6 upvotes · 181.1K views

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.

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Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 2 upvotes · 184.1K views

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.

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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.

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Pros of Amazon EC2
Pros of s3-lambda
  • 647
    Quick and reliable cloud servers
  • 515
    Scalability
  • 393
    Easy management
  • 277
    Low cost
  • 271
    Auto-scaling
  • 89
    Market leader
  • 80
    Backed by amazon
  • 79
    Reliable
  • 67
    Free tier
  • 58
    Easy management, scalability
  • 13
    Flexible
  • 10
    Easy to Start
  • 9
    Elastic
  • 9
    Web-scale
  • 9
    Widely used
  • 7
    Node.js API
  • 5
    Industry Standard
  • 4
    Lots of configuration options
  • 2
    GPU instances
  • 1
    Simpler to understand and learn
  • 1
    Extremely simple to use
  • 1
    Amazing for individuals
  • 1
    All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.
    Be the first to leave a pro

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of Amazon EC2
    Cons of s3-lambda
    • 13
      Ui could use a lot of work
    • 6
      High learning curve when compared to PaaS
    • 3
      Extremely poor CPU performance
      Be the first to leave a con

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      - No public GitHub repository available -

      What is Amazon EC2?

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

      What is s3-lambda?

      s3-lambda enables you to run lambda functions over a context of S3 objects. It has a stateless architecture with concurrency control, allowing you to process a large number of files very quickly. This is useful for quickly prototyping complex data jobs without an infrastructure like Hadoop or Spark.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

      What companies use Amazon EC2?
      What companies use s3-lambda?
        No companies found
        See which teams inside your own company are using Amazon EC2 or s3-lambda.
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        What tools integrate with Amazon EC2?
        What tools integrate with s3-lambda?

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        Blog Posts

        Jan 26 2022 at 4:34AM

        Pinterest

        Amazon EC2RocksDBOpenTSDB+3
        3
        710
        Dec 22 2020 at 9:26PM

        Pinterest

        Amazon EC2C langMemcached+4
        10
        2610
        May 21 2020 at 12:02AM

        Rancher Labs

        KubernetesAmazon EC2Grafana+12
        5
        1484
        What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2 and s3-lambda?
        Amazon LightSail
        Everything you need to jumpstart your project on AWS—compute, storage, and networking—for a low, predictable price. Launch a virtual private server with just a few clicks.
        Amazon S3
        Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web
        Amazon EC2 Container Service
        Amazon EC2 Container Service lets you launch and stop container-enabled applications with simple API calls, allows you to query the state of your cluster from a centralized service, and gives you access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features like security groups, EBS volumes and IAM roles.
        Beanstalk
        A single process to commit code, review with the team, and deploy the final result to your customers.
        Amazon Web Services (AWS)
        It is a comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally.
        See all alternatives