Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling vs. AWS Lambda

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps users maintain application availability and allows users to automatically add or remove EC2 instances according to definable conditions.N/A
AWS Lambda
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
AWS Lambda is a serverless computing platform that lets users run code without provisioning or managing servers. With Lambda, users can run code for virtually any type of app or backend service—all with zero administration. It takes of requirements to run and scale code with high availability.
$NaN
Per 1 ms
Pricing
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingAWS Lambda
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
128 MB
$0.0000000021
Per 1 ms
1024 MB
$0.0000000167
Per 1 ms
10240 MB
$0.0000001667
Per 1 ms
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingAWS Lambda
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingAWS Lambda
Considered Both Products
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Chose Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
The main reason is our total infra is created on AWS and we tend to use the natural service by AWS rather than third party tools, which has more advantages when the auto scaling interacts with other AWS services and its way easy to configure when we compare it with counter …
AWS Lambda

No answer on this topic

Features
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingAWS Lambda
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
-
Ratings
AWS Lambda
8.9
7 Ratings
1% above category average
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)00 Ratings8.67 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings9.23 Ratings
Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
-
Ratings
AWS Lambda
5.2
6 Ratings
14% below category average
Dashboards00 Ratings5.86 Ratings
Standard reports00 Ratings5.45 Ratings
Custom reports00 Ratings4.55 Ratings
Function as a Service (FaaS)
Comparison of Function as a Service (FaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
-
Ratings
AWS Lambda
8.6
7 Ratings
5% above category average
Programming Language Diversity00 Ratings9.07 Ratings
Runtime API Authoring00 Ratings8.17 Ratings
Function/Database Integration00 Ratings8.87 Ratings
DevOps Stack Integration00 Ratings8.47 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingAWS Lambda
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.7 out of 10
IBM Cloud Functions
IBM Cloud Functions
Score 7.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.7 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.7 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingAWS Lambda
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(15 ratings)
8.0
(52 ratings)
Usability
7.6
(2 ratings)
8.3
(17 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(2 ratings)
8.7
(20 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon EC2 Auto ScalingAWS Lambda
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
If you need to establish a system right away, in the past it took weeks or months to request a quote from the vendor and receive the equipment. Now, with Amazon EC2 in less than tens of minutes or hours, you can create a test environment and test it without any inconvenience.
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Amazon AWS
Lambda excels at event-driven, short-lived tasks, such as processing files or building simple APIs. However, it's less ideal for long-running, computationally intensive, or applications that rely on carrying the state between jobs. Cold starts and constant load can easily balloon the costs.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Dynamic scaling can be configured to respond to a wide variety of metrics and alerts
  • Predictive scaling allows one to get ahead of high traffic events rather than simply reacting to them
  • Health checks are configurable based on the needs of your application and architecture
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Amazon AWS
  • No provisioning required - we don't have to pay anything upfront
  • Serverless deployment - it gets executed only when request comes and we pay only for the time the request is getting executed
  • Integrates well with AWS CloudWatch triggers so it is easy to setup scheduled tasks like cron jobs
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Enable cross region auto-scaling. It currently limited to a single region.
  • Support custom health check scripts, deeper integration with application-level metrics. At present, health checks are basic.
  • Adding cost-aware scaling scripts that factor in instance pricing and recommend optimal configurations based on budget constraints.
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Amazon AWS
  • Developing test cases for Lambda functions can be difficult. For functions that require some sort of input it can be tough to develop the proper payload and event for a test.
  • For the uninitiated, deploying functions with Infrastructure as Code tools can be a challenging undertaking.
  • Logging the output of a function feels disjointed from running the function in the console. A tighter integration with operational logging would be appreciated, perhaps being able to view function logs from the Lambda console instead of having to navigate over to CloudWatch.
  • Sometimes its difficult to determine the correct permissions needed for Lambda execution from other AWS services.
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Usability
Amazon AWS
Usability is good since we already know how AWS works. For those that are new it might be a little bit confusing at the beginning but they are improving it at a fast pace. Even though AWS keeps changing the user interface constantly, it is still powerful, understandable and easy to use. For technical people, they still offer the CLI.
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Amazon AWS
I give it a seven is usability because it's AWS. Their UI's are always clunkier than the competition and their documentation is rather cumbersome. There's SO MUCH to dig through and it's a gamble if you actually end up finding the corresponding info if it will actually help. Like I said before, going to google with a specific problem is likely a better route because AWS is quite ubiquitous and chances are you're not the first to encounter the problem. That being said, using SAM (Serverless application model) and it's SAM Local environment makes running local instances of your Lambdas in dev environments painless and quite fun. Using Nodejs + Lambda + SAM Local + VS Code debugger = AWESOME.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
The platform works as is. The help and tutorials on the help page can help you to setup the entire platform without problems, and also provides help on a huge variety of problems. Amazon also provides support plans. We have the basic support plan, but Amazon offers three support tiers, and we know that it works perfect.
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Amazon AWS
Amazon consistently provides comprehensive and easy-to-parse documentation of all AWS features and services. Most development team members find what they need with a quick internet search of the AWS documentation available online. If you need advanced support, though, you might need to engage an AWS engineer, and that could be an unexpected (or unwelcome) expense.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
The main reason is our total infra is created on AWS and we tend to use the natural service by AWS rather than third party tools, which has more advantages when the auto scaling interacts with other AWS services and its way easy to configure when we compare it with counter parts like Autoscale from Microsoft Azure.
Read full review
Amazon AWS
AWS Lambda is good for short running functions, and ideally in response to events within AWS. Google App Engine is a more robust environment which can have complex code running for long periods of time, and across more than one instance of hardware. Google App Engine allows for both front-end and back-end infrastructure, while AWS Lambda is only for small back-end functions
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • We will devote more time to development than server administration, but we will require additional time if you migrate from another ecosystem.
  • Fault detection and reporting are automated in the old server, and bandwidth is fixed per month, but everything is manageable automatically. We only pay for the resources we use.
  • After some months, we met our return on investment (ROI).
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Amazon AWS
  • Positive - Only paying for when code is run, unlike virtual machines where you pay always regardless of processing power usage.
  • Positive - Scalability and accommodating larger amounts of demand is much cheaper. Instead of scaling up virtual machines and increasing the prices you pay for that, you are just increasing the number of times your lambda function is run.
  • Negative - Debugging/troubleshooting, and developing for lambda functions take a bit more time to get used to, and migrating code from virtual machines and normal processes to Lambda functions can take a bit of time.
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