EC2 Instances are virtual machines, that you can provision with minimal friction to get up and running on AWS. EC2 was great for all different use cases, like running basic web servers to running high-performance computing clusters and everything in between. That being said, though EC2 is incredibly flexible, reliable, and scalable, depending on your use case, you might be looking at alternatives for your compute capacity. EC2 requires that you set up and manage your fleet of Instances over time. When you're using EC2, you are responsible for patching your Instances when new software packages come out, setting up the scaling of those Instances, as well as ensuring that you've architected your solutions to be hosted in a highly available manner. This is still not as much management as you would have if you hosted these on-premises. But management processes will still need to be in place. You might be wondering, what other services does AWS offer for compute, that are more convenient from a management perspective? This is where the term serverless, comes in. AWS offers multiple serverless compute options. Serverless means that you cannot actually see or access the underlying infrastructure, or Instances, that are hosting your application. Instead, all the management of the underlying environment from a provisioning, scaling, high availability, and maintenance perspective, are taken care of for you. All you need to do is focus on your application, and the rest is taken care of. AWS Lambda is one serverless compute option. Lambda is a service that allows you to upload your code into what's called a Lambda function. Configure a trigger, and from there, the service waits for the trigger. When the trigger is detected, the code is automatically run in a managed environment. An environment you do not need to worry too much about, because it is automatically scalable, highly available, and all of the maintenance of the environment itself is done by AWS. If you have one or 1,000 incoming triggers, Lambda will scale your function to meet demand. Lambda is designed to run code under 15 minutes. This isn't for long-running processes like deep learning. It's more suited for quick processing, like a web back-end handling requests, or a back-end expense report processing service, where each invocation takes less than 15 minutes to complete. If you weren't quite ready for serverless yet, or you need access to the underlying environment, but still want efficiency and portability, you should look at AWS container services, like Amazon Elastic Container Service, otherwise known as ECS, or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, otherwise known as EKS. Both of these services are container orchestration tools. But before I get too far here, a container, in this case, is a Docker container. Docker is a widely-used platform, that uses operating system level virtualization to deliver software in containers. Now, a container is a package for your code, where you package up your application, it's dependencies, as well as any configurations that it needs to run. These containers run on top of EC2 Instances, and run in isolation from each other. Similar to how virtual machines work. But in this case, the host is an EC2 Instance. When you use Docker containers on AWS, you need processes to start, stop, restart, and monitor containers running across not just one EC2 Instance, but a number of them together, which is called a cluster. The process of doing these tasks is called container orchestration. It turns out, it's really hard to do on your own. Orchestration tools were created to help you manage your containers. ECS is designed to help you run your containerized applications at scale, without the hassle of managing your own container orchestration software. EKS does a similar thing, but uses different tooling and with different features. Both Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS can run on top of EC2. But if you don't want to even think about using EC2s to host your containers, because you either don't need access to the underlying OS, or you don't want to manage those EC2 Instances, you can use a compute platform called AWS Fargate. Fargate is a serverless compute platform for ECS or EKS. That's a bit high level, and it might be confusing, so let's clear that up. If you are trying to host traditional applications, and want full access to the underlying operating system, like Linux or Windows, you are going to want to use EC2. If you are looking to host short running functions, service-oriented, or event-driven applications, and you don't want to manage the underlying environment at all, look into the serverless AWS Lambda. If you are looking to run Docker container-based workloads on AWS, you first need to choose your orchestration tool. Do you want to use Amazon ECS, or Amazon EKS? After you choose your tool, you then need to choose your platform. Do you want to run your containers on EC2 Instances that you manage, or in a serverless environment like AWS Fargate, that is managed for you? Those are just some of your compute options with AWS, and it's not even a complete list. Check out the notes for more information on AWS compute services, as well as others that we didn't get to talk about in this video.
