Amazon Lightsail or Amazon EC2?
Understand the differences and pick the one that's right for you
|
Purpose |
To explore whether Amazon Lightsail or Amazon EC2 meets your needs for a cloud platform or compute web service. |
|
Last updated |
July 23, 2024 |
|
Covered services |
Introduction
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers services that can meet your needs for a cloud platform or compute web service. Two services that are often considered alongside one another are:
-
Amazon Lightsail — a set of core services designed to help you build websites or web applications. Consider Lightsail if you want a simple unified platform with a few foundational services, including virtual servers, HTTP load balancing, managed databases, public container deployment, content delivery network (CDN), DNS management, and domain registration. Lightsail provides fixed and predictable monthly pricing.
-
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) — an AWS service that provides on-demand, scalable computing capacity, with the goal of allowing you to develop, deploy, and scale applications faster. You can use it to launch as many or as few compute instances as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. You can also add capacity by provisioning larger instances (up to hundreds of cores and thousands of GiB memory) or load balancing clusters of smaller instances. Several different pricing models are available depending on your requirements.
When choosing between Lightsail and Amazon EC2, keep in mind the future growth of your workload and how you intend to grow your AWS environment. If your future deployment requires advanced networking or integration with AWS services such as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, or AWS Lambda, you should strongly consider using Amazon EC2.
Here's a high-level view of the key differences between these services to get you started.
Amazon Lightsail |
Amazon EC2 |
|
|---|---|---|
|
Instance Size |
Multiple instance types, ranging from 512 MiB to 64 GiB of RAM, and 2 to 16 vCPUs. For more information, see the compute and block storage tab in the differences section below. |
400+ instance types, from 0.5 GiB to 24 TiB of RAM, and 1 to 448 vCPUs. |
|
Block Storage |
Preconfigured disks up to 640 GB per instance (storage size is tied to instance type). Attach additional disks up to 16 TB with variable pricing. |
Amazon EBS volumes up to 64 TB per volume. Input/output operations per second (IOPS) up to 64,000 per volume (storage size is independent of instance type). |
|
Application Blueprints |
35 pre-configured blueprints, including WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Node.js, and more. |
Common operating systems and with pre-configured software and services in the
AWS Marketplace |
|
Container Support |
Simple deployment of public container images for a fixed monthly cost including data transfer. |
Run container workloads natively on Amazon EC2 using self-managed Docker or Kubernetes, or deploy containers to separate AWS container services such as Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate, AWS App Runner, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda, and others. |
|
Data Transfer |
Generous data transfer allocation included with the fixed monthly fee for every Lightsail compute instance. |
Pay per GB data transfer (out) with flexible pricing tiers and no cost for ingress traffic. |
|
Load Balancing |
Basic load balancing of HTTP/HTTPS for low volume web traffic (up to 5 GB per hour). |
Flexible load balancing for any type of networking use case, including HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP, health checks, auto scaling, and more. |
|
CDN Support |
Global content delivery from Lightsail sources for a fixed monthly fee (up to 50 GB per month included for the first year). |
Amazon CloudFront integration provides flexible content delivery from Amazon EC2 or other AWS or external sources on a pay per GB basis (1 TB per month included for the first year). |
|
Performance |
Choose from 2 to 8 vCPUs (1 to 4 cores), and 512 MiB to 32 GiB memory. |
Unlimited scaling from a single shared to hundreds of CPU cores, and 1 to 1000s of GiB memory. |
|
Pricing |
Fixed and predictable monthly pricing. |
Flexible pay-per-use hourly, or commit-based pricing. |
Details on the differences
Explore differences between Lightsail and Amazon EC2 in six areas. These cover ease of use, compute and block storage, container deployments, load balancing, content delivery network, and managed database support.
Use
Now that you’ve learned about what these services (and the supporting AWS tools and services) are optimized for, you can now dive deeper into how best to use them.
