AWS Amplify vs EC2 Differences Explained

Being one of the most widely used cloud computing platforms, Amazon Web Services provides developers with a wide range of solutions with specific end uses.

With these tools and services at your disposal, you can build, deploy, test, and scale “sophisticated” applications with quality user experience.

Here, we discuss two of these solutions, i.e., AWS Amplify and AWS Elastic Cloud Compute, as we take a look at how each of these solutions helps in different project workflows.

Continue reading to find out the features and advantages of each of the solutions so that you can decide which one better suits your requirements.

What is AWS Amplify?

Launched recently in 2017, Amplify is a service offering form AWS. It has grown to become one of the most popular platforms for designing and deploying full-stack applications hosted on Amazon hosted infrastructure.

Offered as a Backend as a Service (BaaS) implementation, Amplify enables developers to configure backends, deploy static web apps instantly, connect apps, and manage content outside the AWS console easily with the help of a wide range of tools, services, their code dependencies, and a powerful CLI tool.

For added functionality, you can use the Management Console to integrate other AWS services into your apps.

AWS Amplify Core Features

• Analytics

Powered by Kinetics and Pinpoint, Amplify allows developers to monitor and report user behavior on your iOS, Android, or web deployment for specific or user-defined attributes and metrics.

With a real-time data stream, you can easily strategize marketing campaigns targeting user retention and engagement.

• Authentication

With a fully managed user directory, you can also restrict access to the websites hosted using Amplify.

Create seamless authentication for your users with Google, Facebook, and Amazon Login, with features like multi-factor authentication, password recovery, etc.

• Data storage

DataStore is the persistent storage engine offered by AWS that allows developers to manage distributed data easily, without modifying the backend.

Moreover, you can also use S3 buckets to store and access your data from anywhere in the world and enjoy the reliable performance.

AWS Amplify Advantages

• Managed hosting service

When you connect your app’s code repository with the Amplify Console, you can make changes to the frontend and backend configurations within a single CI/CD workflow and accelerate the app release.

Essentially Amplify can be used to deploy and host static websites using the Amazon CDN. You also get access to threshold-based app monitoring and get notified when a trigger event occurs.

Example of apps a user can create using AWS Amplify are mobile apps, web applications, simple page applications,

• Enable AI/ML configurations

Powered by Amazon ML services like Sagemaker, Amplify also allows developers to integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities into their applications.

You can add advanced features like text-to-speech, real-time translation, image recognition, text interpretation and transcription, etc., using GraphQL directives to chain multiple AI actions.

• AWS integrations

Being part of the AWS suite of solutions, you can easily use the Management Console to integrate your app repositories with other AWS offerings like S3 and AppSync.

Amplify natively integrates with Vue, React, Angular, and Ionic for web deployments, and supports Android, iOS, React Native, and Flutter.

What is EC2?

Elastic Cloud Compute is Amazon’s secure and resizable cloud computing platform designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

Offered as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) implementation, EC2 allows developers to rent virtual machines (called Instances) to run their own applications.

Users can create, launch, and terminate as many server “instances” as they require for their project and pay only for the active servers. With control over the geographical location of the instances, users can optimize the latency and redundancy.

EC2 Core Features

• Support for various operating systems

When it launched, EC2 only supported Linux, OpenSolaris, and Solaris Express Community Edition.

Over time, EC2 has added support for various operating systems, including Windows Servers, FreeBSD/EC2, Amazon Linux AMI, with the latest addition being macOS Mojave and Catalina.

• Persistent storage

An EC2 instance can either be created on a local “instance-store” disk or an EBS volume. The latter, Elastic Block Storage, provides persistent raw block devices built on replicated storage, meaning that the loss of one component will not cause data loss of any kind. Moreover, these “blocks” can be connected in RAID to improve the speed and reliability of EBS.

• Amazon CloudWatch

CloudWatch allows developers to monitor the resource utilization in real-time on AWS Management Console and use the aggregated data to strategize business decisions.

The auto-scaling feature is also dependent on CloudWatch as AWS can automatically add or remove EC2 instances based on these metrics.

EC2 Advantages

• Exceptional customizability

As a developer, you can decide the compute capacity of your instances based on the requirements of your project.

You can select from the latest generation Intel XEON, AMD EPYC, and AWS Graviton CPUs and NVIDIA and Inferentia GPUs for workloads that require accelerated computing. Developers get similar choices for high-performance storage, enhanced networking, etc.

• On-demand scalable infrastructure

EC2 autoscaling allows you to automatically scale the capacity of your instances up and down according to user-defined conditions.

Each EC2 region comes with an SLA commitment of 99.99%, allowing AWS to increase or decrease the capacity of the instances within minutes.

Higher availability and reliability are better for running enterprise applications that receive higher traffic and require consistent throughput to handle the incoming traffic. 

• Secure compute

AWS Nitro is used as the underlying platform for the next generation of EC2 instances, where the resources are offloaded to dedicated hardware and software for better security.

Moreover, AWS supports 89 security standards, and the lockdown security model prevents the risks of unauthorized tampering. 

AWS Amplify vs EC2 Comparison

Conclusion

AWS Amplify is the backend as a service platform from AWS. It is a managed service and provides features like storage, hosting, and authentication.

On the other hand, EC2 can be used to launch as many virtual servers as you need for applications with advanced capabilities. It provides features like networking, scaling capabilities, and operating systems/software.

Therefore, you will need to evaluate the requirements of your project thoroughly before selecting either solution. For more information on how each solution can help you get your project out of the production machine to the end-user, get in touch with a reputed app hosting company.

FAQ