EC2 vs Lambda

 

Feature                 EC2                                         Lambda

Server management       You manage it                               AWS manages it

Execution               Continuous or on demand                     Event/request triggered

Scaling                 Configure or use Auto Scaling               Automatic

Billing                 Instance running time, plus other charges   Requests and execution duration, plus other charges

Maximum                 execution time  No fixed                    Lambda-style limit  15 minutes per invocation

OS access               Full control over the VM                    No full underlying server access

Best for                Full backend applications                   Short-lived functions and event-driven workloads