Amazon EC2 vs Apache Spark comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Apache are both solutions in the Compute Service category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.8, while Apache is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.6. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 5.7% mindshare in CS, compared to Apache’s 11.2% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Apache users who would recommend it.

Amazon EC2

Read 65 Amazon EC2 reviews

1,179 Views
773 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Apache Spark

Read 65 Apache Spark reviews

1,526 Views
1,149 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Amazon EC2

Apache Spark

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon EC2 and Apache Spark based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Compute Service solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon EC2 vs. Apache Spark Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EC2 vs. Apache Spark

March 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2

Ranking in Compute Service

6th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Apache Spark

Ranking in Compute Service

4th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Hadoop (1st), Java Frameworks (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 5.7%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apache Spark is 11.2%, up from 9.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Compute Service

Featured Reviews

KatlegoMabila

Senior AWS Account Manager at Silicon Overdrive

Offers customization and flexibility with great support

Scalability depends on whether the client wants to scale up or scale down. It decreases resources based on demand. The great aspect of scalability is the flexibility to allow business success to optimize resource solutions and cost efficiency. Another crucial aspect of scalability is auto-scaling. When you have the opportunity to auto-scale, it can't always be available for everything. If you have chosen to integrate with auto-scaling, it's marvellous and doesn't require additional effort. Auto-scaling gives you the edge by using the capacity you have efficiently, scaling up or down as needed. These flexibilities within the EC2 feature instances of AWS play a crucial role in helping me utilize AWS EC2 Intelligent efficiently.

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Ilya Afanasyev

Senior Software Development Engineer at Yahoo!

Reliable, able to expand, and handle large amounts of data well

We use batch processing. It works well with our formats and file versions. There's a lot of functionality. In our pipeline each hour, we make a copy of data from MongoDB, of the changes from MongoDB to some specific file. Each time pipeline copied all of the data, it would do it each time without changes to all of the tables. Tables have a lot of data, and in the last MongoDB version, there is a possibility to read only changed data. This reduced the cost and configuration of the cluster, and we saved about $150,000. The solution is scalable. It's a stable product.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The scalability and elasticity are helpful."

"Amazon EC2 allows us to create different regions and availability zones based upon application needs."

"I would recommend this solution to others who want to start using it."

"I like EC2 because of its simple workload and the ability to configure VPCs and security groups."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"Amazon EC2 is highly scalable."

"EC2 has helped us to deploy various Microsoft applications efficiently. It has also facilitated our workstation operations."

"The most valuable feature is EC2 is scalable, so when you want to move to market, you don't need to wait until your provision is fast, you can just go and provision it and then easily install your application."

More Amazon EC2 pros

"The memory processing engine is the solution's most valuable aspect. It processes everything extremely fast, and it's in the cluster itself. It acts as a memory engine and is very effective in processing data correctly."

"Apache Spark provides a very high-quality implementation of distributed data processing."

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."

"The product is useful for analytics."

"The solution has been very stable."

"It's easy to prepare parallelism in Spark, run the solution with specific parameters, and get good performance."

"I found the solution stable. We haven't had any problems with it."

"It provides a scalable machine learning library."

More Apache Spark pros

Cons

"The product could benefit from offering more mixed instance types that combine features from different series to suit diverse workload requirements better."

"The solution’s pricing and downtimes could be improved."

"I would like to see more variety in the operating system images used to create test environments in EC2. There should be more versions and releases. Sometimes, you want to test an update from an old release to a higher version, but you can’t do that with the new images available. You have to use your own."

"An area for improvement in Amazon EC2 is the cost because it's a bit higher than competitor pricing."

"Accessibility must be improved."

"They can build automatic features for ENSS or network drive. They have the Control-M feature. Similarly, they should have a feature for the network drive that can be mapped. I have not seen such a feature. They have a lot of products but those are quite costly. There is no cheaper option available for the EC2 instance for syncing two drives. If these features are available, it would be good."

"Regarding availability, a noticeable improvement would be the possibility of more load balancing configurations and the deployment of more datacenters, mainly in Latin America."

"The ease of migrating applications could be improved."

More Amazon EC2 cons

"It would be beneficial to enhance Spark's capabilities by incorporating models that utilize features not traditionally present in its framework."

"More ML based algorithms should be added to it, to make it algorithmic-rich for developers."

"Apart from the restrictions that come with its in-memory implementation. It has been improved significantly up to version 3.0, which is currently in use."

"It needs a new interface and a better way to get some data. In terms of writing our scripts, some processes could be faster."

"Apache Spark lacks geospatial data."

"This solution currently cannot support or distribute neural network related models, or deep learning related algorithms. We would like this functionality to be developed."

"The graphical user interface (UI) could be a bit more clear. It's very hard to figure out the execution logs and understand how long it takes to send everything. If an execution is lost, it's not so easy to understand why or where it went. I have to manually drill down on the data processes which takes a lot of time. Maybe there could be like a metrics monitor, or maybe the whole log analysis could be improved to make it easier to understand and navigate."

"Apache Spark is very difficult to use. It would require a data engineer. It is not available for every engineer today because they need to understand the different concepts of Spark, which is very, very difficult and it is not easy to learn."

More Apache Spark cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When we did the deployment of Amazon EC2 we found it to be less expensive than other solutions."

"Pricing appears to be cheap, however, it is extremely difficult in calculating what something will cost."

"The licensing of Amazon EC2 is expensive. Microsoft Windows Servers are expensive to license."

"The price is reasonable, but there is definitely an opportunity to lower it in instances which are of a higher configuration, because they have been typically used for the long term."

"Amazon EC2 is a very expensive solution."

"We are using a pay-as-you-go model."

"I am using the tier three Amazon service. I am not going to use another solution other than Amazon EC2 because here in Pakistan there are some payment issues for solutions abroad."

"It's expensive, and it could be cheaper."

More Amazon EC2 pricing and cost advice

"Apache Spark is an open-source solution, and there is no cost involved in deploying the solution on-premises."

"The product is expensive, considering the setup."

"It is an open-source platform. We do not pay for its subscription."

"On the cloud model can be expensive as it requires substantial resources for implementation, covering on-premises hardware, memory, and licensing."

"Spark is an open-source solution, so there are no licensing costs."

"Since we are using the Apache Spark version, not the data bricks version, it is an Apache license version, the support and resolution of the bug are actually late or delayed. The Apache license is free."

"It is quite expensive. In fact, it accounts for almost 50% of the cost of our entire project."

"Apache Spark is open-source. You have to pay only when you use any bundled product, such as Cloudera."

More Apache Spark pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

27%

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EC2?

The scalability and elasticity are helpful.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2?

I'm going to mention again that there is quite a bit of complexity within the pricing of EC2 instances. I'm just going to give it six out of ten since there are various standards, upfront and commi...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?

There is not much to be improved or enhanced. One of the things that need to be looked into is the complex pricing, which is rather intense. Sometimes, clients don't understand the structures. Thes...

See all answers

What do you like most about Apache Spark?

We use Spark to process data from different data sources.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Spark?

Compared to other solutions like Doc DB, Spark is more costly due to the need for extensive infrastructure. It requires significant investment in infrastructure, which can be expensive. While cloud...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Apache Spark?

The Spark solution could improve in scheduling tasks and managing dependencies. Spark alone cannot handle sequential tasks, requiring environments like Airflow scheduler or scripts. For instance, o...

See all answers

Comparisons

AWS Fargate vs Amazon EC2

Compared 33% of the time

AWS Batch vs Amazon EC2

Compared 23% of the time

AWS Lambda vs Amazon EC2

Compared 16% of the time

Google App Engine vs Amazon EC2

Compared 8% of the time

Google Compute Engine vs Amazon EC2

Compared 8% of the time

More Amazon EC2 Competitors

Spring Boot vs Apache Spark

Compared 27% of the time

SAP HANA vs Apache Spark

Compared 12% of the time

AWS Batch vs Apache Spark

Compared 12% of the time

Cloudera Distribution for Hadoop vs Apache Spark

Compared 7% of the time

Spark SQL vs Apache Spark

Compared 7% of the time

More Apache Spark Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EC2

April 2025

Download Amazon EC2 product report

Buyer's Guide

Apache Spark

April 2025

Download Apache Spark product report

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2

No data available

Overview

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use. Amazon EC2 provides developers the tools to build failure resilient applications and isolate them from common failure scenarios.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Spark provides programmers with an application programming interface centered on a data structure called the resilient distributed dataset (RDD), a read-only multiset of data items distributed over a cluster of machines, that is maintained in a fault-tolerant way. It was developed in response to limitations in the MapReduce cluster computing paradigm, which forces a particular linear dataflowstructure on distributed programs: MapReduce programs read input data from disk, map a function across the data, reduce the results of the map, and store reduction results on disk. Spark's RDDs function as a working set for distributed programs that offers a (deliberately) restricted form of distributed shared memory

Apache

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini

NASA JPL, UC Berkeley AMPLab, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, UC Santa Cruz, TripAdvisor, Taboola, Agile Lab, Art.com, Baidu, Alibaba Taobao, EURECOM, Hitachi Solutions

Buyer's Guide

Amazon EC2 vs. Apache Spark

March 2025

Free Report: Amazon EC2 vs. Apache Spark

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EC2 vs. Apache Spark and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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