When should you use AWS Lambda versus Amazon EC2?

Amazon EC2 offers flexibility, with a wide range of instance types and the option to customize the operating system, network and security settings, and the entire software stack, allowing you to easily move existing applications to the cloud. With Amazon EC2 you are responsible for provisioning capacity, monitoring fleet health and performance, and designing for fault tolerance and scalability. AWS Elastic Beanstalk offers an easy-to-use service for deploying and scaling web applications in which you retain ownership and full control over the underlying EC2 instances. Amazon EC2 Container Service is a scalable management service that supports Docker containers and allows you to easily run distributed applications on a managed cluster of Amazon EC2 instances.

AWS Lambda makes it easy to execute code in response to events, such as changes to Amazon S3 buckets, updates to an Amazon DynamoDB table, or custom events generated by your applications or devices. With Lambda you do not have to provision your own instances; Lambda performs all the operational and administrative activities on your behalf, including capacity provisioning, monitoring fleet health, applying security patches to the underlying compute resources, deploying your code, running a web service front end, and monitoring and logging your code. AWS Lambda provides easy scaling and high availability to your code without additional effort on your part.