AWS Lambda vs EC2 – Which to Use and When

Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the most significant development in computer technology since microprocessors. As of 2020, 83% of workloads were in the cloud. Even the federal government is joining the party.
AWS offers over 1,000 services that are specifically designed to optimize your cloud experience. It’s almost impossible to know what tools to use with a toolkit this large.
For those who are new to cloud development, it can be overwhelming to stare at the AWS console. You can learn AWS services one at a while, just as you would build a house by building bricks one at a.
Two AWS services are consistently ranked the most popular: Lambda or EC2. Both services offer elastic computational resources to the user, but it might not immediately be obvious which one best suits your specific needs.
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Start trainingLambda specializes on code execution based upon certain triggers, while EC2 serves as Amazon’s core platform to cloud development. There is more to it than that. This is what we’ll be discussing in this post.
Why do you use AWS Lambdas?
It is important to understand the problem AWS Lambda solves before you can simply do what it does.
Imagine you have an image sharing website. Any user can upload any image they wish. They can upload images in any format, including.png and.jpeg.
Your site has been online for a few months now. Traffic is increasing and more images are being added to your server. You now need to convert them to JPEGs, and then store them in your database. You (or your developer), write the code to do exactly that. It is then deployed to your dedicated server.
Your dedicated server’s RAM may be limited if it is located in your basement, bedroom or server room. You may have enough RAM for slow days, but your file conversion code will eventually stall and give you the 500 Error Code.
Your site is now down during the busiest hour of the week… the worst possible time. Because some lines of code received more requests than they could process. Due to server limitations, users leave your site and the revenue they bring.
What can you do? For a while, more RAM might be helpful to the server in order to increase site popularity. Then, it’s back at square one. You might consider buying a new server to protect yourself from any code errors. None of these solutions work and can cause a lot more stress and guesswork. This is the problem Lambda solved.
Lambda makes it easy to deploy code to the cloud without worrying about the unpredictability of server management. No more worrying about your server and praying it doesn’t crash. Lambda allows you to simply deploy the code, and the cloud will do the rest.
What is an AWS Lambda and how does it work?
AWS Lambda is the ideal solution for any event-driven scenario. Event-driven means that the code executes based on an external trigger. Perhaps you want a lambda that triggers when a file is uploaded. You might also want a lambda to run each time an API call is made. The lambda could also be triggered by a job that runs every Sunday at 12 midnight, for example.
These three situations are examples event-driven programming and therefore perfect candidates for Lambda. The most important thing about Lambda is that it uploads code to the cloud and has that code trigger on an event.
Lambda is a great tool for event driven programming. You can simply deploy the code and you are good to go. There are however situations where you may need to have more stringent requirements.
What if you have to host a website, a database or load balancer on your own server? That is a different tool, but it is similar to EC2, which stands Elastic Computing 2.