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  1. Stackups
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  5. Amazon EC2 vs Amazon VPC

Amazon EC2 vs Amazon VPC

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Stacks48.6K
Followers36.0K
Votes2.5K
Amazon VPC
Amazon VPC
Stacks1.6K
Followers746
Votes46

Amazon EC2 vs Amazon VPC: What are the differences?

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; Amazon VPC: Provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud and launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. You can easily customize the network configuration for your Amazon VPC.

Amazon EC2 and Amazon VPC are primarily classified as "Cloud Hosting" and "Virtual Private Cloud" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Amazon EC2 are:

  • Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously.
  • Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine.
  • Flexible – You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application.

On the other hand, Amazon VPC provides the following key features:

  • Create an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud on AWS's scalable infrastructure, and specify its private IP address range from any range you choose.
  • Divide your VPC’s private IP address range into one or more public or private subnets to facilitate running applications and services in your VPC.
  • Control inbound and outbound access to and from individual subnets using network access control lists.

"Quick and reliable cloud servers" is the top reason why over 644 developers like Amazon EC2, while over 39 developers mention "Secure" as the leading cause for choosing Amazon VPC.

Airbnb, Uber Technologies, and Netflix are some of the popular companies that use Amazon EC2, whereas Amazon VPC is used by Coursera, Intuit, and Expedia.com. Amazon EC2 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3607 company stacks & 1615 developers stacks; compared to Amazon VPC, which is listed in 300 company stacks and 79 developer stacks.

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Advice on Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC

Craig
Craig

Principal Consultant at Rootwork InfoTech LLC

Jul 16, 2020

Decided

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.

200k views200k
Comments
Jerome/Zen
Jerome/Zen

Software Engineer

Aug 2, 2020

Needs advice

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.

264k views264k
Comments
Abigail
Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

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.

156k views156k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Amazon VPC
Amazon VPC

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

You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. You can easily customize the network configuration for your Amazon VPC.

Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously.;Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine.;Flexible – You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.;Reliable – Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.;Secure – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your compute resources.;Inexpensive – Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume.;Easy to Start – Quickly get started with Amazon EC2 by visiting AWS Marketplace to choose preconfigured software on Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You can quickly deploy this software to EC2 via 1-Click launch or with the EC2 console.
Create an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud on AWS's scalable infrastructure, and specify its private IP address range from any range you choose.;Divide your VPC’s private IP address range into one or more public or private subnets to facilitate running applications and services in your VPC.;Control inbound and outbound access to and from individual subnets using network access control lists.;Store data in Amazon S3 and set permissions such that the data can only be accessed from within your Amazon VPC.;Assign multiple IP addresses and attach multiple elastic network interfaces to instances in your VPC.;Attach one or more Amazon Elastic IP addresses to any instance in your VPC so it can be reached directly from the Internet.;Bridge your VPC and your onsite IT infrastructure with an encrypted VPN connection, extending your existing security and management policies to your VPC instances as if they were running within your infrastructure.
Statistics
Stacks
48.6K
Stacks
1.6K
Followers
36.0K
Followers
746
Votes
2.5K
Votes
46
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 647
    Quick and reliable cloud servers
  • 515
    Scalability
  • 393
    Easy management
  • 277
    Low cost
  • 271
    Auto-scaling
Cons
  • 14
    Ui could use a lot of work
  • 6
    High learning curve when compared to PaaS
  • 3
    Extremely poor CPU performance
Pros
  • 40
    Secure
  • 6
    Flexible, good isolation, various connectivity options

What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2, Amazon VPC?

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean

We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure

Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

Linode

Linode

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

Scaleway

Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

Rackspace Cloud Servers

Rackspace Cloud Servers

Cloud Servers is based on OpenStack, the open and scalable operating system for building public and private clouds. With the open cloud, you get reliable cloud hosting, without locking your data into one proprietary platform.

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform

It helps you build what's next with secure infrastructure, developer tools, APIs, data analytics and machine learning. It is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube.

Gandi

Gandi

Gandi VPS Cloud Hosting offers you a flexible server with dedicated resources. The VPS virtualization is made possible by Xen technology.

WebFaction

WebFaction

No need to spend hours installing and configuring the software, database and other tools. We have over 50 one-click installers in our control panel.

Joyent Cloud

Joyent Cloud

Joyent is the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, offering the only solution specifically built to power real-time web and mobile applications.

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