EC2 Lambda and Managed Services Questions

Comprehensive understanding of cloud compute options and how to choose between Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and managed deployment services such as Elastic Beanstalk. Candidates should be able to compare tradeoffs between control and operational overhead. Amazon EC2 provides full operating system level control, support for long running and stateful processes, custom machine images, fine grain instance sizing, placement groups for network and latency requirements, and suitability for legacy or specialized workloads. AWS Lambda provides a serverless event driven execution model with automatic scaling, per invocation billing, and minimal infrastructure management but introduces cold start latency, concurrency limits, execution duration limits, and resource constraints. Managed deployment services such as Elastic Beanstalk simplify application deployment and lifecycle management by abstracting infrastructure while still allowing configuration of underlying resources. Candidates should also know instance family characteristics for sizing such as burstable T series, general purpose M series, and compute optimized C series; pricing models including on demand, reserved capacity, savings plans, and spot instances; cost optimization techniques such as right sizing and spot use; and scaling and deployment patterns including auto scaling groups, function concurrency management, scheduled scaling, placement groups, and deployment strategies. Key design considerations include stateless versus stateful architecture, startup time impact, observability and monitoring, testing and deployment complexity, security and compliance, and how each option affects reliability, latency and cost.