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Amazon EC2 vs OpenShift: 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; OpenShift: Red Hat's free Platform as a Service (PaaS) for hosting Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, Node.js, and Perl apps. OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
Amazon EC2 belongs to "Cloud Hosting" category of the tech stack, while OpenShift can be primarily classified 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, OpenShift provides the following key features:
- Built-in support for Node.js, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Java (the standard in today's Enterprise)
- OpenShift is extensible with a customizable cartridge functionality that allows developers to add any other language they wish. We've seen everything from Clojure to Cobol running on OpenShift.
- OpenShift supports frameworks ranging from Spring, to Rails, to Play
"Quick and reliable cloud servers" is the top reason why over 644 developers like Amazon EC2, while over 95 developers mention "Good free plan" as the leading cause for choosing OpenShift.
OpenShift is an open source tool with 916 GitHub stars and 562 GitHub forks. Here's a link to OpenShift's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Amazon EC2 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3580 company stacks & 1569 developers stacks; compared to OpenShift, which is listed in 48 company stacks and 52 developer stacks.
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-scaling270
- 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
- Extremely simple to use1
- Amazing for individuals1
- All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.1
- Simpler to understand and learn1
Pros of Red Hat OpenShift
- Good free plan98
- Open Source62
- Easy setup46
- Nodejs support42
- Well documented41
- Custom domains32
- Mongodb support28
- Clean and simple architecture27
- PHP support25
- Customizable environments21
- Ability to run CRON jobs11
- Easier than Heroku for a WordPress blog9
- Autoscaling7
- Good balance between Heroku and AWS for flexibility7
- Easy deployment7
- PostgreSQL support6
- Free, Easy Setup, Lot of Gear or D.I.Y Gear5
- Shell access to gears4
- High Security3
- Great Support3
- Its free and offer custom domain usage2
- Logging & Metrics2
- Meteor support2
- Overly complicated and over engineered in majority of e2
- Golang support2
- Secure2
- Because it is easy to manage2
- No credit card needed1
- MultiCloud1
- Runs Anywhere - AWS, GCP, Azure1
- This is the only free one among the three as of today1
- Great free plan with excellent support1
- Autoscaling at a good price point1
- Easy setup and great customer support1
- Cloud Agnostic1
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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 Red Hat OpenShift
- Decisions are made for you, limiting your options2
- License cost2
- Behind, sometimes severely, the upstreams1
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