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Amazon EC2 vs Pusher: What are the differences?
Key Differences between Amazon EC2 and Pusher
1. Scalability: Amazon EC2 is designed to provide scalable compute capacity in the cloud, allowing users to easily adjust the number of instances based on demand. Pusher, on the other hand, is a cloud-based messaging service that focuses on real-time features and scalability for chat applications, notifications, and collaboration.
2. Infrastructure Management: With Amazon EC2, users have complete control over the virtual servers, including the operating system, network settings, and storage. On the other hand, Pusher handles the infrastructure management, allowing developers to focus on building their applications without worrying about backend infrastructure.
3. Pricing Model: Amazon EC2 operates on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are billed for the actual usage of the virtual servers. Pusher, on the other hand, offers different pricing plans based on the number of connections and features required, allowing users to choose the plan that suits their needs.
4. Protocols Supported: Amazon EC2 supports a wide range of protocols and operating systems, including HTTP, TCP, UDP, Windows, Linux, and more. Pusher, on the other hand, primarily focuses on WebSocket protocol for real-time communication.
5. Industry Focus: Amazon EC2 is widely used in various industries for different purposes, including web hosting, application development, gaming, and more. Pusher, on the other hand, is specifically designed for real-time features and is commonly used in chat applications, collaboration tools, and notification systems.
6. Integration and Developer Tools: Amazon EC2 provides a set of comprehensive APIs and SDKs for developers to integrate and manage their instances programmatically. Pusher offers a range of client libraries and SDKs to simplify the integration of real-time features into web and mobile applications.
In Summary, Amazon EC2 and Pusher differ in terms of scalability, infrastructure management, pricing model, protocols supported, industry focus, and integration/developer tools.
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
- Elastic9
- Web-scale9
- Widely used9
- 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 Pusher
- An easy way to give customers realtime features55
- Websockets40
- Simple34
- Easy to get started with27
- Free plan25
- Heroku Add-on12
- Easy and fast to configure and to understand11
- JSON9
- Happy6
- Azure Add-on6
- Support5
- Push notification4
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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 Pusher
- Costly11