Compute is one of the IT resources that can be delivered on-demand over the internet with Cloud Computing. Vendors like AWS make sure this service is easy to use with low pricing with their various services.

In this article, I am going to explain what compute means and various AWS services that deliver this resources on-demand with pay-as-you-go pricing.

What is Compute?

Compute objects provides the brains to process your data. Hardware devices in physical data centers is a comparison.

A standard compute device will have a working CPU or multiple CPUs and it will possess many Gigabytes of RAM to process systems and applications. A typical example is a server -physical or virtual-.

Compute resources can be considered the brains and the processing power required by applications and systems to carry out computational tasks via series of instructions.

Servers are the first building block you need to host your applications. They handle requests i.e HTTP and send responses to client. The client, a user or a computer , sends requests and the server handle this request and sends a response. This is only possible with the perfect CPU and RAM that makes the processes run smoothly.

These servers and other compute services are delivered over the internet without you going through the stress of buying and setting up these hardwares in your data centers.

Compute services on AWS

AS a world-class vendor of various Cloud Computing services, AWS has many compute services which can be used by enterprises and companies for their infrastructure at low cost.

At a fundamental level, there are three types of compute options in AWS, these are:

1. Virtual Machines
2. Container services
3. Serverless

Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines are also called Intances. They work on the principle of Virtualization.

These services provide secure and scalable compute services in the cloud. Amazon Elastic Compute [EC2], Amazon Lightshell, and AWS Batch are examples AWS virtual machines.

Container Services

Containers provide you with a standard way to package your application's code and dependencies into a single object. AWS has services which supports the use of Dockers and Kubernetes at low cost and they are also scalable.

AWS has Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Container Registry(ECR), and Amazon Kubernetes Service(EKS) has its container compute services.

Serverless

When we say Serverless, we mean your code runs on servers but you don't need to provision or manage these servers. You have more focus on innovating new products and features instead of maintaining servers.

AWS manages the servers and the underlying infrastructure for you. An AWS service for serverless computing is the AWS Lamda.

These services are scalable, multi-utility, fast, have a wide-scope and exist in multiple locations.

To learn more about AWS Compute services, visit the AWS Compute Service page.