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AWS Elastic Beanstalk vs Amazon EC2 vs Amazon LightSail: What are the differences?
Key Differences between AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon EC2, and Amazon LightSail
AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon EC2, and Amazon LightSail are all cloud computing services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Although they all offer infrastructure resources, they have significant differences in terms of features and functionalities.
Elastic Beanstalk: Elastic Beanstalk is a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering that allows developers to deploy and manage applications quickly and easily. It abstracts the underlying infrastructure and automates deployment processes, making it ideal for developers who want to focus on application development rather than infrastructure management. Elastic Beanstalk is highly scalable, handles load balancing, auto scaling, and application health monitoring, and is best suited for web applications that require rapid deployment and scalability.
Amazon EC2: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) provides scalable virtual servers in the cloud. It offers a customizable virtual computing environment where users have full control over the operating system, networking, and security. EC2 is designed for developers who need complete control over their infrastructure and want to run various applications, including legacy systems, databases, and complex enterprise applications. Unlike Elastic Beanstalk, EC2 requires manual configuration and management of instances, as well as load balancing and scaling.
Amazon LightSail: Amazon LightSail is a simplified virtual private server (VPS) offering that provides a pre-configured environment for deploying web applications or blogs. LightSail is designed for developers and small businesses who want a simple and cost-effective way to launch and manage websites without the complexities associated with EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk. It offers a fixed set of resource configurations, easy deployment options, and integrated storage capabilities. However, LightSail lacks advanced features such as auto scaling and load balancing, making it less suitable for high-traffic or rapidly growing applications.
Deployment Complexity: Elastic Beanstalk abstracts the infrastructure and automates many deployment tasks, allowing developers to focus more on application development. EC2 requires manual configuration and management, making it more suitable for advanced users who need fine-grained control. LightSail simplifies the deployment process, but it has limited configuration options compared to Elastic Beanstalk and EC2.
Scalability and Automation: Elastic Beanstalk provides built-in scalability and automation features such as auto scaling and load balancing. EC2 requires manual configuration and management for these features. LightSail lacks advanced scaling capabilities, making it less suitable for rapidly growing applications.
Flexibility and Control: EC2 offers the highest level of flexibility and control, allowing users to customize the entire infrastructure stack according to their specific requirements. Elastic Beanstalk abstracts the underlying infrastructure to simplify deployment, while LightSail provides a fixed set of resource configurations, limiting customization options.
In summary, Elastic Beanstalk is a fully managed platform-as-a-service offering that automates deployment processes and is suitable for rapid deployment and scalability. EC2 offers complete control over the infrastructure and is ideal for running various applications with high flexibility. LightSail simplifies the deployment process for web applications but lacks advanced features and scalability options.
We have an Angular app for our B2B app and I'm unable to understand what to choose and why? currently, we use the Azure Web app. What can be the possible issues with each Stack?
I want to make sure that we have high availability with minimum infrastructure requirements such as load balancers and web servers. But with maximum performance metrics. 1) EC2 will give full control to me but I will have to manage everything on my own. 2) EBS is a more or less managed system but will we lack any less control? 3) S3 is it scalable and can it handle large requests that will need load balancers and what about performance metrics.
Hi Vibhanshu, When it comes to serving a static website, single page application, S3 or a combination of S3/CloudFront, is a great fit. There is no server that you need to manage, and S3 is as resilient and scalable at it gets. Moreover, it's certainly the most cost-effective solution you'll be able to come up with. Is your application fully static or does it come with compute needs? - Regardless, I would highly discourage you from running anything directly on a custom EC2 instance of your own, as this will from the get-go but also over time, come with high maintenance costs. - Elastic Beanstalk, (not to be mistaken with EBS, which acronym stands for Elastic Block Storage), on the contrary, is a rather powerful way to manage your applications and environments. Either via the CLI or through the console, you can easily configure your environment variables, load balancers, certificates, events/thresholds causing your instances counts to scale up/down, steaming of logs... - Elastic Beanstalk supports by default a couple of language, but these don't always allow you to run the version/dependency you need. For best decoupling from the underlying instances, you might want to look at leveraging Docker (Elastic Beanstalk has Docker-compatible AMIs), so you are in control of the stack you application runs on.
As you have only mentioned an Angular app so I'm assuming that you're hosting your backend APIs separately. You can do a production build of the Angular app and put it in S3 (without public access). Next, you can create a CloudFront distribution for this bucket and point a record in your Route53 hosted domain to this distribution. This way your website will be highly available and fast as caching will be available. Note: With this method, you should make sure when you push new build in the bucket, you do not delete the service-worker script or else service worker will stop caching.
I will not recommend using EC2 as it seems overkill for this task. You will have to manage an AMI with Nginx or Apache or some other static web server on your own. You will also have to attach an elastic IP with the instance or an ALB for connecting it to a Cloudfront distribution. Too much work.
You can go with Elastic Beanstalk. It will reduce the setup work but still big resources for an Angular SPA.
As a bonus, you can have multiple Cloudfront distribution+S3 bucket for multiple environments (production, staging, etc.) and use weighted routing in Route 53 record for AB test or blue/green deployments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pros of Amazon EC2
- Quick and reliable cloud servers647
- Scalability515
- Easy management393
- Low cost277
- Auto-scaling271
- Market leader89
- Backed by amazon80
- Reliable79
- Free tier67
- Easy management, scalability58
- Flexible13
- Easy to Start10
- Widely used9
- Web-scale9
- Elastic9
- Node.js API7
- Industry Standard5
- Lots of configuration options4
- GPU instances2
- Simpler to understand and learn1
- Extremely simple to use1
- Amazing for individuals1
- All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.1
Pros of Amazon LightSail
- Low cost4
- Simple Deployment4
- Simple pricing scheme1
Pros of AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- Integrates with other aws services77
- Simple deployment65
- Fast44
- Painless28
- Free16
- Well-documented4
- Independend app container3
- Postgres hosting2
- Ability to be customized2
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Cons of Amazon EC2
- Ui could use a lot of work13
- High learning curve when compared to PaaS6
- Extremely poor CPU performance3
Cons of Amazon LightSail
Cons of AWS Elastic Beanstalk
- Charges appear automatically after exceeding free quota2
- Lots of moving parts and config1
- Slow deployments0
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