Amazon’s New Containers and Lambda Aims To “Win Over” Programmers and Developers

Last week at AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon launched new products and services that are aimed at winning over programmers and developers. Amazon’s EC2 Container Service and AWS Lambda are changing the way programmers and developers work, by offering container management for the AWS Cloud and making it easier to build applications that run in the cloud.

EC2 Container Service

Amazon’s EC2 Container Service (or ECS for short) is a highly developed distributed application platform. It is lighter in weight, has less memory and computational overhead than virtual machines do. The EC2 Container Service is making it easier to support applications that work with a vast amount of smaller remote “moving parts” (code). The goal for this container service is to make effective use of efficient system resources. With this service you are running Docker containers across a cluster of EC2 instances using powerful API’s.

The benefits of EC2 Container Service

There are many benefits to using Amazon’s EC2 Container Service, such as these listed below, that will help you build, run and scale all your Docker based applications:

• High Performance: Developers and programmers will be able to use containers as application building blocks, being able to start stop and manage thousands of containers in seconds.
• Simple Cluster Management: Docker containers are made up of clusters that are set up and managed by ECS. ECS can scale to clusters that have tens of thousands of containers across multiple available zones.
• Flexibility in Scheduling: ECS includes a built-in scheduler that works to spread containers out across clusters to balance utilization availability.
• Extensible and Portability: ECS runs the same Docker daemon that you run in-house. So you can easily move your in house workloads to the AWS cloud and back.
• Effective and Efficient Resources: An application that is containerized can make a very effective and efficient use of your resources. For example, being able to run multiple, unrelated containers on the same EC2 instance to make use of all your available resources. Like being able to run a bunch of short -term batch code with longer term web services in the same instance.
• Security: Your tasks and functions run on ECS instances within Amazons Virtual Private Cloud. This takes advantage of security groups and other AWS security resources.
• Integration with AWS: Your applications make use of AWS features such as Elastic IP addresses, resource tags, and Virtual Private cloud (VPC).

AWS Lambda

Amazon Web Service (AWS) Lambda is a new way to build and run applications in the cloud. With Lambda, you create a Lambda function and give it permission to access AWS resources and then connect that function to your AWS resources. With AWS Lambda you don’t have to configure, launch, or monitor instances and you won’t have to install any operating systems or language environments. Your created functions are able to handle tens of thousands of requests per hour which is very cost effective to the developer.

The benefits of AWS Lambda

The benefits of Lambda are many, but these are some of the highlighted benefits that developers and programmers will appreciate:

• Enable Different Kinds of Workloads: AWS Lambda will enable developers and programmers to have multiple workloads running on the same instance, making it quicker and easier to get your applications finished.
• Granular Code Execution: Lambda will speed up your work process with broken up code execution, and system scalability.
• Unlimited Scalability: Make your projects and applications as big and extensive as possible with AWS Lambda.
• Per-Execution Charging: AWS Lambda will charge based on the amount of compute time used to run the script, in increments of 100 milliseconds. This is a unique and cost effective way to charge for what you need.