Learning AWS Day by Day — Day 65 — Amazon LightSail V/S Amazon EC2

Exploring AWS !!

Day 65

Amazon LightSail V/S Amazon EC2

Amazon LightSail — set of services designed to help you build website or applications. LightSail is to be considered when we decide building a simple platform with services like virtual servers, Load balancing, databases, container deployment service, DNS and CDN.

Amazon EC2 — provides on-demand, scalable compute capacity, allowing you to develop and deploy your application quickly. You can launch as many instances as required using images, and maintain security and networking as required.

When deciding between LightSail and EC2, consider about future requirements and what kind of AWS environment will be required. You need to think about your future workload, how much needs to be handled, and what kind of load may increase. If future deployments need advanced networking or integration, where you may need services like RDS, Lambda or DynamoDB, consider using EC2.

- Instance size varies for both, EC2–400+ instance types, from 0.5 GiB to 24 TiB of RAM, and 1 to 448 vCPUs, whereas for LightSail — 7 instance types, from 512 MiB to 32 GiB of RAM, 2 to 8 vCPUs, and 20 GB to 640 GB storage.

- Application Blueprints for EC2 — common OS and pre-configured software, LightSail — 35 pre-configured blueprints, including WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Node.js, and more.

- Containerization for EC2 — Deploy containers through servers using Docker and Kubernetes, for LightSail — simple public containers for deployment.

- Data Transfer, EC2 — pay per GB, and no cost for ingress, LightSail — Generous data transfer allocation included with the fixed monthly fee for every LightSail compute instance.

- Load Balancing, EC2 — flexible load balancing for HTTP, HTTPS, TCP or UDP, LightSail — basic load balancing for HTTP/HTTPS.

- CDN support, EC2 — CloudFront Integration, LightSail — Global content delivery from LightSail sources.

- Performance for EC2 — unlimited scaling, LightSail — Choose from 2 to 8 vCPUs (1 to 4 cores), and 512 MiB to 32 GiB memory.

- Pricing for EC2 — flexible, pay-per-use, LightSail — fixed and predictable.