A company wants to design a microservices architecture for an application. Each microservice must perform operations that can be completed within 30 seconds. The microservices need to expose RESTful…

Using Amazon ECS on Amazon EC2 for hosting microservices still involves managing the underlying EC2 instances and adds the overhead of container orchestration, making it less operationally efficient than a direct EC2 Auto Scaling Group deployment if containerization is not a strict requirement.

Deploying microservices as AWS Lambda functions with Amazon API Gateway is generally considered serverless and low operational overhead. However, for a complex microservices architecture, managing numerous individual Lambda functions, their cold starts, state, and intricate inter-service communication patterns might introduce new operational complexities that some teams perceive as higher overhead than traditional VM management, especially if significant code refactoring is needed.

Hosting microservices on Amazon EC2 instances within Auto Scaling groups behind an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) provides a flexible and scalable environment for RESTful APIs. For organizations with existing expertise in VM management, this approach can represent a familiar and manageable solution, offering control over the runtime environment and allowing for implementation of client access control and rate limiting (e.g., via WAF or within the application).

Deploying microservices on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk automates some management but still runs on EC2 instances, meaning server management is still involved. Amazon CloudFront is primarily a content delivery network and does not natively provide the comprehensive API management (client access control, rate limiting) required for the microservices' APIs.