Amazon Lightsail vs Amazon EC2

Purpose

• Explore whether Amazon Lightsail or Amazon EC2 meets your needs for a cloud platform or compute web service.
• Understand the differences and choose the right service for your requirements.

Introduction

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers services for cloud platforms or compute web services.
• Amazon Lightsail: Designed for building websites or web applications with a simple, unified platform.
  • Includes virtual servers, HTTP load balancing, managed databases, public container deployment, CDN, DNS management, and domain registration.
  • Offers fixed and predictable monthly pricing.
• Amazon EC2: Provides on-demand, scalable computing capacity for faster application development, deployment, and scaling.
  • Allows launching multiple compute instances, security configuration, networking, and storage management.
  • Offers various pricing models based on requirements.
  • Ideal for deployments requiring advanced networking or integration with AWS services like Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, or AWS Lambda.

Key Differences

Instance Size

• Lightsail: Multiple types from 512 MiB to 64 GiB RAM, 2 to 16 vCPUs.
• EC2: Over 400 types, from 0.5 GiB to 24 TiB RAM, 1 to 448 vCPUs.

Block Storage

• Lightsail: Preconfigured disks up to 640 GB, additional disks up to 16 TB.
• EC2: Amazon EBS volumes up to 64 TB, IOPS up to 64,000 per volume.

Application Blueprints

• Lightsail: 35 pre-configured blueprints (e.g., WordPress, Magento).
• EC2: Common OS with pre-configured software in AWS Marketplace.

Container Support

• Lightsail: Simple public container image deployment with fixed monthly cost.
• EC2: Native container workloads via Docker or Kubernetes, support for AWS container services.

Data Transfer

• Lightsail: Generous data transfer included with the monthly fee.
• EC2: Pay per GB data transfer with flexible pricing tiers.

Load Balancing

• Lightsail: Basic HTTP/HTTPS load balancing for low volume traffic.
• EC2: Flexible load balancing for various networking use cases.

CDN Support

• Lightsail: Global delivery from Lightsail sources with a fixed monthly fee.
• EC2: Amazon CloudFront integration for flexible content delivery.

Performance

• Lightsail: 2 to 8 vCPUs, 512 MiB to 32 GiB memory.
• EC2: Unlimited scaling, single shared to hundreds of CPU cores.

Pricing

• Lightsail: Fixed, predictable pricing.
• EC2: Flexible pay-per-use or commit-based pricing.

Details on Differences

• Differences explored in:
  • Ease of use
  • Compute and block storage
  • Container deployments
  • Load balancing
  • Content delivery network
  • Managed database support

Conclusion

• Choose based on immediate needs and future workload growth.
• Consider advanced capabilities and integrations with broader AWS services for Amazon EC2.