What is difference between Lightsail and EC2?

Question

Recently Amazon launched Lightsail. Is there any difference between them? If yes, then what's the difference? Are Lightsail instances more powerful than EC2?

Answer 1

 Amazon Lightsail and Amazon EC2 instances differ from each other in terms of pricing, suitability, templates and API integration.

Refer to the following table of differences for a detailed comparison between Amazon Lightsail and Amazon EC2 on the above mentioned grounds.

	Amazon Lightsail	Amazon EC2
Pricing	Lightsail is much less costlier than EC2 instances.  Various outbound costs are included in lightsail instances, such as, each lightsail instance includes 5 TB of internet data transfer allowance.	Outbound costs are not included in EC2 instances. An enterprise using EC2 instances may have to pay $90 per TB of outbound data transfer.
Suitability	Lightsail might not be ideal for applications that need highly configurable environment or high CPU performances. Lighsail would be perfect for small developers.	For applications that require high CPU performances or highly configurable environment, Amazon EC2 would be the most appropriate choice. EC2 is meant for meant for huge organizations
API integration	There is no particular web service interface for Lightsail. Amazon Lightsail instances are not accessible directly from the AWS management console.	Amazon EC2 instances are virtual machines with Amazon's web service interface.

 

Answer 2

• EC2 is a service by AWS which offers managed VM instances with Amazon "web service interface" and allows you to manage every aspect of your VM from a single point. EC2 is meant for huge organizations. EC2 is more secure, robust and easily scalable. You can manage all your EC2 instances from the EC2 interface.
• Amazon Lightsail is the easiest way to launch and manage a virtual private server with AWS. It provides simple un-managed VM instances, where you can do whatever you want. Lightsail is for small developers who don't need complex functionality.
• There is no such "web service interface" with light sail VM's they are plain Linux VM's with root access.

Hope this answer helps you!

Answer 3

Like any other cloud based computing platform, EC2 provides computing capability in one of world’s best cloud environment. It comprises of virtual servers, security groups, networking and storage.

Amazon Lightsail is a pre configured environment, which provides everything needed to launch and deploy a project. In simple words, you can say that Lightsail is a subset of EC2 which offers a previously set options to choose, according to the project requirement, including SSD based storage, DNS management, static ip, computing environment and above all of these, a fixed price