This blog summarizes some of the AWS Compute services. I deliberately do not cover the ones that deal with containers, as I plan to blog separately about those. I'm looking at Google Cloud side by side from now on so I'll keep updating these posts just to mention if there is an equivalent. When I get to Azure, I'll do the same there as well :)
EC2: EC2 is one of the most popular services that AWS has. It basically allows you to spin up virtual machines with a variety of operating systems (Linux, Windows and possibly others) and gives you a root account on it. You can then SSH into it using key authentication and manage the system. What you want to use it for is completely up to you: Host a website, crack passwords as a pen-tester, test some software or really anything else.
The GCP equivalent for EC2 is Compute Engine.
Lightsail: Lightsail is very similar to EC2 except it comes with pre-installed software such as Wordpress or a LAMP stack as well and you have to pay a little money to own the server. The plus here is that it's easier for users who are non-technical to use Lightsail, compared to EC2 where you have to do everything yourself. In other words it is Amazon's VPS solution.
Lambda: This is AWS's Function-as-a-Service solution. In other words you write code and upload it to Lambda. You don't necessarily have to worry about where you'll host your code and how you'll handle incoming requests. You can configure triggers in each of these other services and then have Lambda act when the trigger is activated. For example: You can create a bunch of REST APIs and have the back-end requests handled by a Lambda function, upload files to S3 and have something happen each time a specific file is uploaded or do more detailed log analysis each time an event is logged to Cloudwatch. Lambda is integrated with a large number of AWS services so it is well worth learning it and using it better.
The GCP equivalent for Lambda is Functions.
Elastic Beanstalk: If you have some code that you've built locally and want to quickly deploy it without worrying about the underlying infrastructure you'd use to do it and don't want to spend a lot of time tweaking it - Beanstalk is the way to go. You can for example choose Python as a runtime environment, upload your Python code and let AWS then take over. AWS will create roles, security groups and EC2 instances that are needed (among anything else) and deploy your application so it is then easily accessible. If you need additional components such as databases or want to modify the existing configuration, these can be added later to the environment.
The GCP equivalent for Elastic Beanstalk is App Engine.
Serverless Apps Repository: This is a large repository of applications that have been created by users and uploaded for use by the community. One can grab these applications and deploy it in one's own AWS account. The requisite resources are then created by deploying a SAM template. The applications can be used as is or modified/code-reviewed before actually using it. If you change your mind, you can delete the CloudFormation template - this will delete all the AWS resources that were created during deployment.
EC2: EC2 is one of the most popular services that AWS has. It basically allows you to spin up virtual machines with a variety of operating systems (Linux, Windows and possibly others) and gives you a root account on it. You can then SSH into it using key authentication and manage the system. What you want to use it for is completely up to you: Host a website, crack passwords as a pen-tester, test some software or really anything else.
The GCP equivalent for EC2 is Compute Engine.
Lightsail: Lightsail is very similar to EC2 except it comes with pre-installed software such as Wordpress or a LAMP stack as well and you have to pay a little money to own the server. The plus here is that it's easier for users who are non-technical to use Lightsail, compared to EC2 where you have to do everything yourself. In other words it is Amazon's VPS solution.
Lambda: This is AWS's Function-as-a-Service solution. In other words you write code and upload it to Lambda. You don't necessarily have to worry about where you'll host your code and how you'll handle incoming requests. You can configure triggers in each of these other services and then have Lambda act when the trigger is activated. For example: You can create a bunch of REST APIs and have the back-end requests handled by a Lambda function, upload files to S3 and have something happen each time a specific file is uploaded or do more detailed log analysis each time an event is logged to Cloudwatch. Lambda is integrated with a large number of AWS services so it is well worth learning it and using it better.
The GCP equivalent for Lambda is Functions.
Elastic Beanstalk: If you have some code that you've built locally and want to quickly deploy it without worrying about the underlying infrastructure you'd use to do it and don't want to spend a lot of time tweaking it - Beanstalk is the way to go. You can for example choose Python as a runtime environment, upload your Python code and let AWS then take over. AWS will create roles, security groups and EC2 instances that are needed (among anything else) and deploy your application so it is then easily accessible. If you need additional components such as databases or want to modify the existing configuration, these can be added later to the environment.
The GCP equivalent for Elastic Beanstalk is App Engine.
Serverless Apps Repository: This is a large repository of applications that have been created by users and uploaded for use by the community. One can grab these applications and deploy it in one's own AWS account. The requisite resources are then created by deploying a SAM template. The applications can be used as is or modified/code-reviewed before actually using it. If you change your mind, you can delete the CloudFormation template - this will delete all the AWS resources that were created during deployment.
No comments:
Post a Comment