We performed a comparison between Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and AWS Lambda based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both products are very effective in providing compute service (IaaS) solutions. AWS Lambda slightly nudges ahead of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling as many users feel it is easier to code using the solution. AWS Lambda is serverless, server configuration is not required, and can easily run it directly anywhere.
"The most useful feature is elasticity. You can scale up or down based on traffic."
"Most of what I've deployed are CI/CD pipelines. AWS is scalable. You can always increase or adjust the resources to meet the specific requirements. I also like choosing an instance in any location, preferably the closest one. We don't have any AWS locations in South Africa, but the latency is about the same as hosting in Europe."
"We appreciate that this solution allows us to run all of our severs through it, meaning that our workloads are mainly on the EC2 instance only."
"Sometimes, Auto Scaling is more beneficial, and sometimes, Reserved Instances are preferred, especially for longer-term usage."
"The support from Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is very good."
"The feature I found most valuable was the vertical and horizontal scaling."
"It has the best auto-scaling features."
"One of the most important benefits is that a company can optimize resources because Auto Scaling deploys resources when needed. For example, for Black Friday, a company can deploy 100 servers for a couple of days. When Black Friday is over, the company can delete those servers."
"The most valuable feature is that it scans the cloud system and if they are any security anomalies it triggers an email."
"The solution offers good performance."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the API Gateway."
"The stability is good."
"The solution runs on the latest cloud technology so it is easy to deploy cloud-native projects."
"AWS Lambda's best features are log analysis and event triggering and actioning."
"AWS Lambda has improved our productivity and functionality."
"It is serverless and scalable. It can scale infinitely. You don't have to worry about the size of the servers that you're pre-allocating. You don't have to build server scale-out models. Auto scale and other similar features are just inherent in Lambda. So, for atomic and fairly non-persistent transactional units of work, Lambda works very well."
"Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling could improve by adding better integration features with the other services. Additionally, if the alarms could be triggered from other services this would be beneficial."
"I would like to see the security portal improved in the future."
"There is room for improvement. You might end up paying a high price if you're not careful and you provision a server that's underutilized."
"Could integrate more with other platforms."
"If your EC2 instance doesn't boot up, you're in the dark about what's happening. It would be amazing if you could get a view of the console to see the status. There's something called the AWS Console, which is a web portal. I would like to see a virtual screen of an instance that hasn't started properly, so I can see where it crashed."
"The tool must provide proper guidelines to troubleshoot connectivity issues."
"When creating a new instance there is a set of questions that have to be answered, and this is something that can be simplified."
"It's an expensive solution."
"Another challenge I've noticed is that there is a limit to the environment variables such as the 4 KB limit. Although, the advice is to use parameters or other things to store the details when the limit has exceeded the data, this adds additional intensity to the application. If the size limits for environment variables can be revealed, it would be helpful. Even if we have to pay for it, at least we would know that we are not dealing with latency. So, I would like to see the size of the environment variables increased."
"It could be cheaper."
"The price in general could always be better."
"I want to see support for longer applications. I need the 15-minute time-out window to improve."
"Lambda can only be used in one account; there's no possibility to utilize it in another account."
"My engineers work with it on a daily basis. I just don't have enough depth of knowledge about what kinds of edge cases they may have tried and found lacking. There may be some issues with some language support at one point or another because we couldn't get the underlying libraries in there. A lot of what we do is either in JavaScript, Python, or some of the non-compiled languages. I'm not sure if we've ever tried building a C# solution, for instance, in Lambda or a Java solution in Lambda. It doesn't mean those aren't its capabilities. I would rather refer to my engineers for where the boundaries are."
"AWS Lambda could be improved by increasing the size of the payload. Also, sometimes Lambda doesn't implement well for bigger solutions."
"Lambda could be improved in the sense that some of the things done with Lambda function take some time. So the performance could be better and faster."
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is ranked 2nd in Compute Service with 39 reviews while AWS Lambda is ranked 1st in Compute Service with 70 reviews. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is rated 8.8, while AWS Lambda is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling writes "Well-documented setup process and highly stable solution". On the other hand, the top reviewer of AWS Lambda writes "An easily scalable solution with a variety of use cases and valuable event-based triggers". Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is most compared with AWS Fargate, AWS Batch, Oracle Compute Cloud Service and Amazon Elastic Inference, whereas AWS Lambda is most compared with AWS Batch, Apache NiFi, Apache Spark, AWS Fargate and Google Cloud Dataflow. See our AWS Lambda vs. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling report.
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We monitor all Compute Service reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
