Choose Right AWS Compute Service to Run Application and Workload
Updated: Mar 5
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides many ways how you can run your application and workload. There are Compute services, Container services and Serverless paradigms. It also depends on where you want to run your piece of software:
In the Cloud on AWS infrastructure (hardware, network) and managed by AWS installed software to manage the hardware.
On-premise on your local infrastructure (hardware and network) but managed by AWS installed software stack to manage the hardware.
On AWS provided hardware that resides in your local network managed by AWS installed software stack to manage the hardware.
On AWS provided hardware that runs in Internet providers network managed by AWS installed software stack to manage the hardware.
or in a hybrid environment. j
A compute instance is a hardware that gives you CPU and memory to execute your software or service that you want to run. The compute instance could be a bare metal compute server or a Virtual Machine (VM). Sometimes you can configure what kind of processor and memory you want and provision a compute instance from the AWS management Console. Sometimes AWS presents you a few predefined T-shirt sizes to choose from. This article focuses on the VMs and not on the containers and serverless paradigm. Depending on which service you choose you manage the VMs completely, partially, or not at all. In this article, I am going to explain what your options are in terms of Compute Services and which one you may choose depending on your need.
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AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
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AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
You can provision an AWS EC2 instance in any AWS Region and any Availability Zone in a region. An EC2 instance is a compute resource. You can specify or choose how many Virtual CPUs (vCPUs) you want and how much memory you want while provisioning an EC2 instance. You also can specify which Operating System called Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) you want to use. You can also use your AMIs that come with 3rd party software installed or create your own customized AMI. For Windows OS you can also bring your own license. You can also associate different kinds of storage volume; for example, AWS EFS and AWS EBS volumes. You can also associate other AWS services like AWS S3 buckets, AWS databases, Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) and Elastic IP address any many more with the EC2 instance.
You can choose different types of instances based on cost models and capacity. In terms of cost model EC2 provides these choices:
On Demand instances: You can get these instances any time you want and for any period you need them. No questions asked but of course it comes with the highest price.
Dedicated Hosts: You can choose a dedicated physical server for a long time and reserve the capacity only for you. You can reserve these instances with up to 70% of the On-demand price.
Spot instances: You can order instances with current spot discount prices, but AWS can take back the instances from you when the sport price increases. Generally, these instances you use when the workload running in the instances runs for a short time are not critical and can be rerun.
Reserved instances with Savings Plans: Using the savings plan you commit to AWS that you are going to reserve several instances (of your choice) and AWS will give you whenever you want them. As you preorder and reserve for a long time you get them at less price. But like a Dedicated host you don't get to know or control which physical server will be used. Even if you don't use the reserved instances, you still pay to AWS.
Scheduled Reserved Instances: It allows you to reserve instances on a recurring schedule e.g., a particular time and hours in a day, or in a week or month. The workloads which need to run on a specific schedule and do not need 24/7 availability are the ideal ones for this type of instance.
In terms of capacity EC2 has these variations, which are expressed by EC2 families and their sizes:
General purpose: These instances are a balance of compute, memory, and network resources, you can use these instances when you are not sure which type is best for you or simply want to host any applications that use an equal proportion of these resources.
Compute Optimized: These instances give you more CPU power and should be used for more compute intensive workloads.
Memory Optimized: These instances give you more memory for the workloads who need them.
Storage Optimized: When we need to store huge data sets in local storage and need high sequential read and write performance, these instances can be used.
Accelerated Computing: These instances come with hardware accelerators or co-processors that are basically GPU optimized for graphics or multimedia related workloads. You can also use them for ML workloads.
When you launch multiple EC2 instances for horizontal scalability of your application or workload you can place them into different Availability Zones (AZs), partitions in an AZ or different hardware rack in an AZ with the help of Placement Group. You can achieve high compute and network performance by using High Performance Computing instances. EC2 also provides a mechanism called Auto Scaling where you can define metrics based or predictive configurations that allows you to achieve horizontal scale in and scale out of your EC2 instances dynamically. You can use the EC2 launch template to create and save the configuration of an EC2 instance that you provision in AWS. You can use EC2 Fleet to configure the capacity and cost mix for a group or EC2 instances. The EC2 instances can be configured for automatic Health checking. AWS CloudWatch can be used to enable monitoring the instances and AWS CloudTrail can be used to track the calls made to the Amazon EC2 instances.
In these EC2 instances AWS manages the hardware and the OS by providing patches. But if you install any other 3rd party software or deploy any kind of application or run any workload, those must be managed by you. You will decide how to deploy your code in those EC2 instances, how to run the application or workload, how to manage the lifecycle, how to prepare the environment needed for your application and workload, how to update the environment and how to scale. Even if the EC2 instance crashes you manage how to replace and redeploy your code.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
When deploying application code in EC2, you need to decide the design and deploy the environment. For example, if you need to run a Java application you need to install Java in the EC2 instance first. In Elastic Beanstalk there are predefined programming language environments and environment configurations. You choose which environment to use starting from choosing the web server environment tier or worker environment tier. Then choose which kind of runtime environment you need e.g., containerized, or non-containerized, if non-containerized then which programming language, if web server then which kind of application server to use, which kind of reverse proxy to use, if you would like to use other AWS services (for example, Amazon RDS, DynamoDB, ElasticCache). You choose how many EC2 instances you want, whether you want to apply load balancing, if you want a separate VPC you configure the VPC and security group and many more. Most importantly where to fetch the code that needs to be deployed. Then AWS creates the resources with specified configuration and environment. For example, AWS creates load balancers and associates the load balancer with the EC2 instances, applies auto-scaling rules and health monitoring of the resources. AWS deploys your code also on those EC2 instances. But at the same time all the resources created are visible to you and you have full control of the resources. Without Elastic Beanstalk you had to configure and launch those AWS resources, associate those resources with each other to build the environment and then deploy the application server and deploy code. Elastic Beanstalk asks all the environment configurations and details needed to build the environment from you and does the rest of the job. At the end, it deploys your code. AWS does not charge you anything to use Elastic Beanstalk, you pay for the underlying Cloud resources that you use.
Amazon LightSail
When you investigate, in AWS Elastic Beanstalk you still need to configure the resources and build your application stack. In Amazon LightSail a predefined technology stack is provided, you need to choose which application stack you want to use e.g., WordPress, LAMP, MEAN even fully configured MySQL and PostgreSQL Database plans with predefined processing memory, storage, and data transfer rates. You can choose on which OS the application stack should run and choose from a pre-configured hardware stack (memory, Disk, Processor, Network Transfer) which is configured with load balancing and network configurations. When you want to run your business application on the most common hardware and software stack it becomes quicker to deploy the code and start implementing business logic and easier to manage your application. All the hardware and software stack are managed by AWS. AWS uses EC2 to host the application that you deploy but it's invisible to you. As you can see LightSail does a lot of tasks for you but is also heavily opinionated. It does not give you a lot of options to configure and manage the hardware and software stack which you need sometimes. Web applications are most suitable to host in Amazon LightSail. AWS does not charge you anything to use LightSail, you pay for the underlying Cloud resources that you use.
AWS Outposts
In the case of EC2, Elastic Beanstalk and LightSail the hardware resources like CPU, memory, storage, and network devices reside with AWS in their datacenters. In AWS Outpost AWS delivers AWS servers and racks to your location. The servers and racks follow industry standards, and certified personnel set the hardware into your datacenter. You can configure the hardware you need and order them to be delivered to your location. But the main difference is that the hardware stays in your datacenter, so data processing done by the applications deployed on these servers are done locally and data does not leave your datacenter. But the Outpost servers and racks need to be connected to a parent AWS region via AWS Direct Connect private connection, a public virtual interface, or the public Internet of your choice. You can use the same AWS tools as Management Console to manage the resources and workloads that run in the outpost. You can use a local gateway to connect outposts to local networks. Along with ensuring data does not leave private data centers you can take advantage of the same AWS API s, tools development methods to run & manage resources and deploy applications in outposts same as AWS cloud. After you connect the outpost to an AWS region, you can extend the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in the Region to include the Servers and racks in the outposts by adding the outpost subnet in the VPC. The EC2 instances in the outpost subnets communicate via a private IP address to the EC2 instances in other subnets in the same VPC in the Region. We can associate multiple outpost subnets with a VPC and to multiple VPCs. Here you need to keep in mind that AWS is only responsible for the hardware and software that run AWS services but you as an AWS customer are responsible to secure the outposts. Though all AWS services are not available, many common services are available in AWS outposts.
AWS Wavelength
Unlike Aws Outpost where the AWS servers and resources are in your local network and you need to secure the resources in the outpost, in AWS Wavelength AWS installs the AWS resources in the phone and internet network providers location which are called Wavelength Zones. Wavelength Zones are AWS infrastructures where compute and storage services are deployed in the AWS partner Communication Service Providers (CSPs) equipped with 5G. These are the Edge locations where the Aws resources and services are available for you to develop, deploy, run, and scale your applications which need ultra-low latency network communication capability. This enables you to use mobile edge computing infrastructure in Edge locations. You can host applications that need to provide high-resolution video streaming to your mobile app users or run AI or ML workloads close to the Edge location in your IoT network. The Wavelength Zones support a specific set of EC2 instances and EBS volumes along with VPCs and subnets. Other supported AWS services are Amazon EKS clusters, Amazon ECS clusters, Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, AWS CloudFormation, and AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB). A network component called the Carrier Gateway is used to connect the customer subnets in Wavelength Zones to the CSP’s network, the internet, or the AWS Region through the CSP’s network. You can use AWS Management Console to manage the resources and applications that run in the Wavelength Zones. EC2 instances in different Wavelength Zones cannot communicate to each other by default. You need to create a VPC for each Wavelength Zones and use a transit gateway to connect the VPCs.
AWS Snowball Family
While AWS Outposts and Wavelength in Wavelength Zones need to be connected to a network, AWS Snowball Family is built for a complete opposite scenario where there is not enough or not at all network connectivity. It can be either because you need compute power in remote locations where there is no network connection or network connection is intermittent, or you want a completely isolated environment for high-security reasons. Snow Family devices have computing and storage resources to collect and process data on the Edge. You can configure the resources you need before you order the device which is delivered by AWS partners with E-Ink shipping label for end-to-end device tracking and a module that is hardware and boot environment tamper proof. The devices and the workloads deployed into it can be managed by AWS OpsHub GUI. All data moved through AWS Snow Family devices is automatically encrypted, the encryption keys are never stored on the device. Aws Snow family consists of AWS Snowball Edge, AWS Snowcone and AWS Snowmobile. AWS Snow Family devices can be used for Offline data migration.
AWS Snowmobile can move extremely large amounts of data (up to 100 PB) from your location to AWS. AWS Snowmobile is a 45-foot-long shipping container pulled by a semi-trailer truck equipped with GPS tracking and 24/7 video surveillance.
Whereas AWS Snowcone is a small portable device that can be powered and connected to your local network and machines. We can process data in Snowcone using the EC2 instances and load data to snowcone either by NFS mount point and ship the device back to AWS. On the other hand, AWS DataSync can be enabled for online data transfer from the device to AWS.
The AWS Snowball Edge comes with different flavors.
Compute Optimized with 104 vCPUs, 416 GB of memory, and 28 TB of dedicated NVMe SSD as block storage. These resources are used to launch EC2 instances and perform compute tasks within the Snowball device itself.
Compute Optimized with GPU for compute intensive tasks.
Storage Optimized with up to 100 TB storage capacity, it is used for offline data transfer.
Storage Optimized with EC2 compute functionality, comes with up to 80 TB of usable storage. It also has 24 vCPUs, 80 GB of memory and 1 TB of SSD as block storage, which can be used to launch EC2 instances in the AWS Snowball Edge and do some computation tasks.
VMware Cloud on AWS
If we are not provisioning a base metal machine in AWS, most of the time we are using a VM provided by AWS by creating EC2 instances in Cloud or even using containers in Beanstalk or LightSail that runs in VMs provided by AWS. In Outposts and Wavelength, we always get VMs provided by AWS interns through creating EC2 instances. VMware Cloud on AWS provides the VMware SDDC software stack in AWS Cloud e.g., vSphere, vSAN and vCenter Server. When all your workloads in the private datacenter are already on VMware and you want to extend your private datacenter to cloud, this is an easy option for you. This way you can use the same set of tools to manage the VMware software stack and perform disaster recovery in the cloud as you do on-premises. This makes your cloud migration easier by taking a lift and shift approach. You can then combine many services and capabilities provided by AWS cloud with your workload running in the VMware stack.
Understand AWS Batch
In all the above AWS services you are responsible for which kind of workload you want to host and how to organize and design the workload including batch jobs. Batch jobs have specific needs and design. Only beanstalk asks you whether you would like to use a worker environment tier, but it does not provide you off the shelf capability to configure, plan, schedule and execute batch jobs. AWS Batch offers you these capabilities which are defined by you but fully managed by AWS. you can run thousands of batch jobs in parallel and at scale. It automatically provisions EC2 instances optimized with memory and CPU as you need. You can choose from AWS provided batch compute environments or alternatively you can use EC2 instances managed by you. You can define the CPUs, memory needed, types of EC2 instances, volume mount points, container properties, environment variables, dependencies between different jobs, different resource allocation strategies and set up multiple queues with different priority levels. You can define job retry strategies and timeouts and where the job outputs will be written. Step by step you define the compute environment, define a job queue, describe job definition, and create a job. after you create a job AWS batch will put the job in queue. The Batch scheduler will take jobs from the queue and schedule jobs whenever the required compute environment can be acquired. if the compute environment is available, it will launch the environment and run the job on the environment. You can monitor different status of the job.
Understand Amazon EMR
AWS Batch can run any average batch jobs whereas Amazon is specialized to do batch processing on real time streams and can run big data workloads for interactive analytics, and machine learning with frameworks like Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and Presto. Amazon EMR comes under analytics services, and similarly there are many AWS services that are designed to run specific types of workloads like Machine Learning workloads, Analytics workloads etc.
With this information you will be better equipped to choose which compute service to choose when you want maximum control on your infrastructure and deployment.