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Amazon EC2 vs Jelastic: 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; Jelastic: Java and PHP Cloud Hosting. Jelastic is the next generation of Java hosting platforms which can run and scale ANY Java application with no code changes required.
Amazon EC2 can be classified as a tool in the "Cloud Hosting" category, while Jelastic is grouped under "Platform as a Service".
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, Jelastic provides the following key features:
- Set up environment in seconds
- No installation or configuration
- No APIs to code to
"Quick and reliable cloud servers" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon EC2 over the competitors, whereas "Managed hosting" was stated as the key factor in picking Jelastic.
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 servers645
- Scalability514
- Easy management392
- Low cost276
- Auto-scaling269
- Market leader88
- Backed by amazon80
- Reliable78
- Free tier66
- Easy management, scalability57
- Flexible12
- Easy to Start10
- Web-scale9
- Widely used8
- Elastic8
- Node.js API7
- Industry Standard4
- Lots of configuration options3
- GPU instances2
- Amazing for individuals1
- Extremely simple to use1
- All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.1
- Simpler to understand and learn1
Pros of Jelastic
- Automatic scaling13
- Managed hosting12
- Pay-per-Use on an hourly basis12
- Constantly evolving8
- Multiple hosting providers6
- Full automatic vertical and horizontal scaling5
- High availability5
- SSH access5
- Jenkins3
- Great support3
- Easy to use2
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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 Jelastic
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