Amazon S3 vs. EC2 - Similarities and Differences (with Case Study) - HRM (2023)

Amazon Web Services or AWS is the largest cloud platform among cloud services. It powers numerous digital infrastructures for private and public organizations of all sizes. When AWS first launched in 2006, it started with a few core services. Two of them are EC2 and S3. These first-generation services have been the cornerstone of AWS, and fifteen years later people are still actively using them. In this article, we'll find out what S3 and EC2 are and their similarities and differences.

EC2

EC2 stands for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2 is one of the first generation services in AWS. EC2 is basically a server running in the cloud. Traditionally, to run your system on servers, you had to buy servers and install them in-house. From ordering to maintaining this infrastructure themselves, their tasks are unimaginably demanding. It's expensive and inefficient. When they get old, you're going to have to replace them and migrate all your software over to the new one.

When EC2 came along, it was a game changer. I still remember my first experience with EC2. I was able to get a server for a really low price with just a few clicks. The entire industry benefits from this new way of owning servers. What's even more amazing is that upgrading EC2 hardware, for example, higher CPU, RAM or larger storage, you can also do it with a few clicks, without worrying about migrating your software. When you upgrade, AWS automatically moves all your software to the new software. This makes vertical scaling so easy. Additionally, you have the flexibility to mount storage of various sizes (EBS or Elastic Block Storage) on different Amazon EC2 instances.

S3

S3, or Simple Storage Service, is an object storage service. This is the storage infrastructure Amazon.com uses for its global e-commerce network. You can use this service to store all types of files of any size (e.g. local hard drive) at an affordable price. You might think of it as similar to cloud file storage services like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box. Well, it's somewhat similar to how you can store files in the cloud. However, it's not just about storing files.

In addition to file storage, Amazon Simple Storage Service provides additional functionality that allows users to build Internet applications, perform file backup and recovery. You can also use S3 as data lake storage and hybrid cloud storage for big data workloads and analytics. The service is known for its scalability, high availability, and low latency, with a durability of 99.999999999% and availability between 99.95% and 99.99%, according toWikipedia. This reliability is critical to business continuity.

S3 and EC2 are separate services, so they are more different than similar. However, they still have something in common.

similarities

Similarities exist in the functional and architectural domains. However, S3 and EC2 have different design goals. Therefore, the best use cases for the two should be different. Substituting one for the other is difficult and not advisable.

Application front-end code base

An EC2 instance is a server. In EC2, you can store code and other files such as images, video, audio, etc. for use by your application. You can also run backend and frontend code together. This is not surprising.

From the explanation about S3, we understand that S3 is storage. We know we can store these files. What's interesting here is that you can actually store front-end code for your application, such as HTML, Javascript, ReactJS, etc. Of course, you can store content files such as video, audio, and images in S3 so that your application can use them too. To use S3 as a front-end source, we need to move from a server-based to a serverless architecture.

In AWS, it provides a serverless ecosystem through Lambda. AWS Lambda is basically a function that can be invoked from different points including EC2, API Gateway, CloudWatch, etc. When you adopt the serverless concept, you put the backend code in Lambda and the frontend code in S3. We'll cover this in more detail in the use case section below. For the similarities here, remember that you can use S3 for your front-end code. When you plan to build a static website, this architecture can help you reduce costs significantly.

file storage

When you're working with S3 on the AWS web console, you might forget that S3 basically runs on the server as well. AWS provides a convenient UI-based management console where users can upload and download files and use other extensible features. However, S3 is basically a server like EC2. You can store files in S3 and EC2. If we were to argue about the best use case, AWS generally recommends users to use S3 for storing files. In terms of functionality, you can use both to place files.

S3 provides almost unlimited storage size, while with EC2 you can increase the storage size and add the number of EC2 instances to get more storage. Likewise, AWS does not recommend that you scale EC2 just for storage size. For file management, S3 offers more robust options and an affordable pricing structure. In addition, it provides easy data backup.

Compatible with other AWS services

In AWS, there are no completely isolated services. All AWS services can interact with other AWS services. EC2 and S3 are no exception. They can be called by other services and vice versa. EC2 can access S3 to use and manage files. AWS has an extensive library of APIs for all major programming languages. Users can use them to programmatically interact with resources in AWS.

difference

Because they are different services, there are more differences than similarities. The difference lies in the purpose of EC2 and S3.

Servers and Storage

Although you can find similarities in some of the features shared above, each of them is designed for different goals. EC2 is a server service. It has become one of AWS's most important trademarked services. EC2 is also used for other AWS services that require a server. For example, when you train a machine learning model, it requires a lot of computing power. In AWS SageMaker, when you execute a training job, SageMaker allows you to choose the number and type of instances so that you are free to use EC2 instances for training.

Redshift is AWS's data warehouse service that runs on servers. You can scale up and down horizontally by determining the number of instances and their specifications. There are many more use cases that explain what EC2 is for.

S3 is a storage service in AWS. But, there's more. Just as other AWS services use EC2 instances, S3 is also used when storage is required. For example, S3 is used to build data lakes in AWS. Due to the nature of file storage, you can store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data in Amazon S3 buckets. This is in contrast to relational databases which can only store structured data. You can then query this data using AWS Athena. S3 can be used to store code files to be run in other services. S3 is a scalable storage service in AWS.

pricing structure

Another major difference is their pricing structure. For EC2, AWS bills you based on the hours your EC2 instance runs. For S3, you are charged by the total data size in the S3 bucket. Costs can be further differentiated by the type of EC2 instance. It gets more expensive when you use a more powerful EC2 instance with more storage attached. In S3, you can save costs by using a different storage type such as IA (Infrequently Accessed) or Glacier.

case study

A good way to learn about EC2 and S3 is to look at the examples. Here, we'll look at five use cases for EC2 and S3 in different industries. As you read through, you'll probably be able to get a good idea of ​​how you want to use the services.

Emodo

Edmoto, a global online education technology company, has seen a 1,500% surge in users during the COVID-19 pandemic. To meet surging demand, Edmoto had to scale up quickly. Edmoto uses EC2 and CloudFront. Patchin, Vice President of Marketing at Edmodo,explain, "Using Amazon EC2 instances, we have been able to rapidly increase site capacity by 15 times to continue providing teachers and students with uninterrupted access to our solution for their distance learning needs." Since EC2 instances can easily scale up and out , Edmodo was able to meet the growing demand.

INEOS UK Team

INEOS TEAM UK is a British sailing team based in Portsmouth, UK. The team was formed in 2018 to bring the America's Cup, the world's oldest international sporting trophy, to the UK. The upcoming race will be held in Auckland, New Zealand in 2021. Like all other teams, the team will compete on a team-designed boat. Race organizers have developed guidelines to test the sailing skills of the crew. Part of the purpose of the restrictive rules is to control the cost of entering the competition so that many entrants can participate.

Despite these limitations, the team was able to design the shape of the boat's monohull and hydrofoils. However, it was impossible to physically create various designs and test them on water. To solve this problem, engineers turn to computer-based simulations to optimize their designs. Tested over thousands of simulations to find the best boat shape and position at sea. INEOS TEAM US needed to run 2,000 – 3,000 simulations for their boat.

For speed and cost-effectiveness, the team chose AWS EC2 instances and used spot instances, which give users access to unused Amazon EC2 capacity at a lower price. "Combining the speed and low cost of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances means we can do more simulations within our design budget,"explainHolroyd, Head of Design. He added, "One of the questions I often ask myself is whether we are spending our money wisely. With AWS, I have no doubts because it dramatically compresses compute turnaround time and minimizes design time."

band lab

BandLab is a music cloud company that helps users create, mix, revise, sync and collaborate across digital devices (smartphones, tablets and computers). Since people have access to these everyday digital tools, they can enjoy the convenience and convenience of making music. The BandLab app attracts over 40,000 new users every day around the world. With constant growth, BandLab had to find a place to store 4PB of data and prepare additional storage space for the future. To meet the demands of massive data, BandLab chose AWS S3.

Nick den Engelsman, Senior Cloud Systems Engineer and Architect,explain, “We made a decision in early 2017 that anything related to audio—transcoding, mixing, you name it—would be done on AWS.” He added: “The main reason we want to move Because we expect the number of users to increase in the future, and therefore the number of audio samples uploaded by users, we have to transcode. We know that Amazon S3 can handle it because it has almost unlimited scale.” By using AWS S3, to At the end of 2020, the company was able to serve 26 million users at an optimized cost.

AsiaNet News Media & Entertainment

Asianet News uses Amazon Relational Database (RDS) and EC2 to run its applications—content management system, news web application, and mobile application. The media company experienced thousands of concurrent users per second and unforeseen traffic spikes. Their RDS usage is read-centric rather than write-centric, which makes the company pay higher infrastructure costs during peak periods. Anoop Mohan, Product Manager of Subnet News,explainThat said, with EC2's hourly pricing, they still pay for low-traffic or idle EC2 instances during low-traffic periods.

To optimize data and server infrastructure usage and their costs, they decided to migrate from RDS to DynamoDB and Lambda instead of EC2. The company achieved low-latency performance from the backend by integrating Lambda with API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, and CloudWatch. “Thanks to Lambda’s sub-second metering model, we only pay for the milliseconds consumed instead of every hour, and we reduced our overall operating costs by 50 percent,” Mohan said. Moving to DynamoDB also allowed us to easily sync and Operating multiple events in parallel helped us further reduce database costs by a factor of 48."

Wanli.com

MilesWeb builds, hosts and manages websites for businesses worldwide. The company provides services for various types of websites, including blogs, personal websites, and e-commerce websites. The company provides 24/7 technical support to more than 10,000 customers. MilesWeb was launched in 2012. Since then, it has bought or leased on-premises servers and data centers to run its clients' websites. Chinmay Dingore, Co-Founder and Executive Director, MilesWeb,explain, “One of the challenges we faced was downtime, which increased to 12 to 16 hours over a six-month period. For our clients with high-traffic e-commerce sites, this level of disruption is unacceptable."

Other significant challenges include the lengthy process of attaching storage or upgrading RAM, which causes downtime. After they migrated their infrastructure to AWS, they experienced high performance and low cost. Their website latency has dropped by 30%, and their administrative costs have dropped by 30%. Chinmay Dingore, co-founder and executive director of MilesWeb, said: "The website took 5 to 6 seconds to load, but since migrating to AWS, the load time has dropped to 3.5 to 4 seconds -- a reduction of about 30 percent." He added : "Through the migration, our management costs have been reduced by 30%."

To increase the storage size in EC2 instances, you can use Amazon Elastic Block Store. You can attach EBS volumes to server instances so that you can have scalable file storage in your cloud infrastructure.

wrap up

In this article, we looked at the similarities and differences between S3 and EC2. These two AWS services play key roles in the AWS ecosystem and exist to empower each other. As you read the case studies, you now have a better understanding of both services and AWS in general. The good news is that AWS offers a free trial, and there's no better way to learn than by doing it yourself.