Types of AWS Compute Services

In the Cloud, there are many services that allow you to host your application. One such service is AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 is a virtual machine where you can rent its computing power to host your web applications, gaming server, processing datasets, running analytics, and many more. Companies such as Netflix, Airbnb, and financial institutions use EC2 to run handle heavy compute and storage requirements, such as on-demand delivery of video content, process bookings, handling search queries, managing data storage, risk analysis models, performing algorithmic trading, and handling high-frequency trading operations.

However, not everyone wants to endure the hard labor of configuring and maintaining servers. We just want to focus on building good and unique applications, things that are vital to our company. With serverless computing, you can do just that.

Serverless Computing

The term “serverless” means that your code runs on servers, but you do not need to provision or manage these servers.

Another benefit of serverless computing is the flexibility to scale serverless applications automatically. Serverless computing can adjust the applications' capacity by modifying the units of consumption, such as throughput and memory.

There are many serverless like Amazon Lambda, Azure Function, Google Cloud Functions, and IBM Cloud Functions.

AWS Lambda

While using AWS Lambda, you pay only for the compute time that you consume. Charges apply only when your code is running. You can also run code for virtually any type of application or backend service, all with zero administration.

Containers

Another way to deploy your application is to use containers. Containers provide you with a standard way to package your application's code and dependencies into a single object.

One problem is scalability. When you scale you would have to manage multiple hosts with hundreds or thousands of containers on memory usage, security, logging, and so on.

To implement containers in your workload:

1. Choose an orchestration tool: Amazon ECS or EKS

2. Choose a platform: EC2 that you manage or Fargate that manages them for you.

Container Orchestration Tools

Docker	Kubernetes
Software platform that enables you to build, test, and deploy applications quickly	Software that enables you to deploy and manage containerized applications at scale
A tool for creating and running containers	A tool for managing and orchestrating multiple containers across multiple hosts
Creating images and running containers locally or on a single host	Deploying and managing containers at scale across multiple hosts in a cluster

AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate is a serverless compute engine for containers. It works with both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.

- You do not need to provision or manage servers.

- Manages your server infrastructure for you.

Comparing compute types

Feature	EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)	Serverless Computing	Containers
Provisioning	Requires manual provisioning	No manual provisioning	Requires manual provisioning
Scalability	Vertical and horizontal scaling	Auto-scales based on demand	Horizontal scaling
Deployment	Manual deployment and configuration	Deployed automatically	Manual deployment and configuration
Resource Management	Manual resource management	Managed by the cloud provider	Manual resource management
Startup Time	Longer startup time	Instant startup	Short startup time
Cost	Pay for running instance	Pay per request or execution	Pay for running instance
Isolation	Isolated virtual machines	Isolated functions	Isolated containers
Complexity	Requires more configuration and management	Simplified configuration and management	Moderate configuration and management
Flexibility	Full access to OS	Limited control, focused on function logic	Moderate control and customization
Use Cases	Traditional applications	Event-driven, Service-oriented short-lived functions	Microservices, portable applications