Is your 'Bare EC2' over SSL? I've used Apex Ping as well (btw it runs on Lambda), and it seems they open a new connection on each ping.
Getting 15 ms latency on a brand new TLS connection is nearly impossible over the internet. If you actually check the latency breakdown on your Ping, you'll see the TLS handshake is dominating the API Gateway -> EC2 request.
I'm all for this type of analysis, but too often it isn't apples to apples.