AWS EC2 vs EMR vs SageMaker

An overview of AWS's most popular products to deploy machine learning projects with its respective advantages/disadvantages and instructions on how to launch them.

Nowadays, individuals, companies, and governments prefer to use cloud machines over traditional computers for multiple reasons. Among those are the ability to switch machines, upgrade them quickly, obtain bigger RAM, more cores, more GPUs, and perhaps the best reason of all, you pay per second instead of an up-front cost.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most popular on-demand cloud computing platforms at the moment. It offers a variety of technical infrastructure products and services. In this article, we will overview three of the most popular tools to deploy machine learning models: EC2 instances, EMR clusters, and SageMaker Notebooks.

|    Tool   | AWS info |         Pros        |    Cons    |
|:---------:|:--------:|:-------------------:|:----------:|
|    EC2    |   Link   |       Baseline      |  Baseline  |
|    EMR    |   Link   | Cheap, Auto-Scaling | Cumbersome |
| SageMaker |   Link   |    Easy, Powerful   |  Expensive |

EC2

Amazon Elastic Computed Cloud (Amazon EC2) offers virtual computing machines called instances. Along with Amazon S3 buckets, these are the most popular services in the AWS ecosystem.