EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)
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What is it?
AWS' "big giant powerful" cloud computing offering. Unlike a lot of other AWS services that have some "specific" function, EC2 has an absolutely ridiculous number of functions and services within it, but all are about server provisioning.
Why did we choose it?
Actually a rather odd reason: to load balance Deserted Chateau's webservers, we needed a load balancer advanced enough to support HTTP host header routing. The tech behind this is a bit complex, but basically without that we'd need two or more load balancers which would become a major pain to deal with.
What do we use it for?
The ALB (Application Load Balancer) service. Deserted Chateau uses a single load balancer, that serves both our webservers and our messaging servers. This is possible to do with one server thanks to ALB's support of host header routing.
Lightsail (the simplified AWS web offering) has load balancers, but they have far fewer features. We'd have to use multiple of them to achieve the same thing, which is both inefficient and expensive.