Building and running your organization starts with compute, whether you are building enterprise, cloud-native or mobile apps, or running massive clusters to sequence the human genome. AWS has over 70 infrastructure services 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 accelerate their operations and pace of innovation.
AWS offers a comprehensive portfolio of compute services allowing you to develop, deploy, run, and scale your applications and workloads in the world’s most powerful, secure and innovative compute cloud.
| If You Need To.... | Customer Management Responsibilities | Deployment Unit | Consider Using |
|---|---|---|---|
| Run any application. Control and manage server or cluster level functions such as scaling and deployment. |
|
Virtual Machines |
Amazon EC2 |
| Run simple applications and websites on one or a few servers for a low, predictable price. |
|
Virtual Private Server (Instance) | Amazon Lightsail |
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 Elastic 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. Lambda is the core of serverless computing, which lets you build and run applications and services without thinking about servers.
Common Use Cases:
- Web applications
- Mobile backends
- IoT backends
- Stream processing workloads
- File processing workloads