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Amazon EC2 vs Clever Cloud: What are the differences?
What is Amazon EC2? Scalable, pay-as-you-go compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
What is Clever Cloud? Deploy and run apps with bulletproof infrastructure, automatic scaling, and fair pricing. Clever Cloud is a polyglot cloud application platform. The service helps developers to build applications with many languages and services, with auto-scaling features and a true pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Amazon EC2 and Clever Cloud are primarily classified as "Cloud Hosting" and "Platform as a Service" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Amazon EC2 are:
- Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously.
- Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine.
- Flexible – You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application.
On the other hand, Clever Cloud provides the following key features:
- Auto-scalability
- Multi-language
- SQL and NoSQL
"Quick and reliable cloud servers", "Scalability" and "Easy management" are the key factors why developers consider Amazon EC2; whereas "Quick & easy setup", "Amazing support" and "Ultra fast answer to any question" are the primary reasons why Clever Cloud is favored.
Airbnb, Uber Technologies, and Netflix are some of the popular companies that use Amazon EC2, whereas Clever Cloud is used by Scala.IO, Spendabit, and Rude Baguette. Amazon EC2 has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3580 company stacks & 1570 developers stacks; compared to Clever Cloud, which is listed in 21 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.
DigitalOcean was where I began; its USD5/month is extremely competitive and the overall experience as highly user-friendly.
However, their offerings were lacking and integrating with other resources I had on AWS was getting more costly (due to transfer costs on AWS). Eventually I moved the entire project off DO's Droplets and onto AWS's EC2.
One may initially find the cost (w/o free tier) and interface of AWS daunting however with good planning you can achieve highly cost-efficient systems with savings plans, spot instances, etcetera.
Do not dive into AWS head-first! Seriously, don't. Stand back and read pricing documentation thoroughly. You can, not to the fault of AWS, easily go way overbudget. Your first action upon getting your AWS account should be to set up billing alarms for estimated and current bill totals.
We first selected Google Cloud Platform about five years ago, because HIPAA compliance was significantly cheaper and easier on Google compared to AWS. We have stayed with Google Cloud because it provides an excellent command line tool for managing resources, and every resource has a well-designed, well-documented API. SDKs for most of these APIs are available for many popular languages. I have never worked with a cloud platform that's so amenable to automation. Google is also ahead of its competitors in Kubernetes support.
GCE is much more user friendly than EC2, though Amazon has come a very long way since the early days (pre-2010's). This can be seen in how easy it is to edit the storage attached to an instance in GCE: it's under the instance details and is edited inline. In AWS you have to click the instance > click the storage block device (new screen) > click the edit option (new modal) > resize the volume > confirm (new model) then wait a very long time. Google's is nearly instant.
- In both cases, the instance much be shut down.
There also the preference between "user burden-of-security" and automatic security: AWS goes for the former, GCE the latter.
Most bioinformatics shops nowadays are hosting on AWS or Azure, since they have HIPAA tiers and offer enterprise SLA contracts. Meanwhile Heroku hasn't historically supported HIPAA. Rackspace and Google Cloud would be other hosting providers we would consider, but we just don't get requests for them. So, we mostly focus on AWS and Azure support.
Pros of Amazon EC2
- Quick and reliable cloud servers647
- Scalability515
- Easy management393
- Low cost277
- Auto-scaling270
- Market leader89
- Backed by amazon80
- Reliable79
- Free tier67
- Easy management, scalability58
- Flexible13
- Easy to Start10
- Widely used9
- Web-scale9
- Elastic9
- Node.js API7
- Industry Standard5
- Lots of configuration options4
- GPU instances2
- Extremely simple to use1
- Amazing for individuals1
- All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.1
- Simpler to understand and learn1
Pros of Clever Cloud
- Quick & easy setup147
- Amazing support104
- Ultra fast answer to any question87
- Github integration82
- Time saver74
- Fast apps66
- Cool admin interface62
- Postgresql as a service51
- Receive email from the ceo when one of my process crash43
- Easy deployment of playframework33
- Autoscale nodejs processes20
- Easy nodejs deployment19
- Don't need devops in our team16
- Great service15
- Elegant and convenient paas and great support12
- Easy mongodb backup11
- Great customer support11
- Easiest scala / playframework setup i have seen10
- Really great and usefull product with an amazing team9
- Awesome docker support8
- Quick & easy to start to use8
- Git push and it's prodded7
- Up & running with Node in minutes7
- Deploy with docker6
- Easy setup with great customer support6
- Superficial support team5
- Amazing experience - after using heroku, nodejitsu, etc5
- Really safe,quick and responsive! probably best one4
- Customer support is awesome4
- More than efficient scaler3
- Clean interface3
- My devs like it which means I like it! Great support3
- KISS principle3
- Easy setup, CTO and team influencers2
- Easy setup and deploy for play framework and scala2
- Amazing Gif Generator2
- No-brainer, efficient, never gets in the way2
- Great docker support, just via web + git2
- They are a pleasure to work with2
- Awesome support and easy to use..! using laravel (php)2
- Haskell support without worries2
- Easy deployment2
- Top notch support by developer peers2
- No code integration needed2
- Auto redeploy after git push2
- Manage ops parts for me1
- They accept bitcoin1
- Ffmpeg available for nodejs servers1
- Simple to use, brilliant team, super reliable1
- Reported bugs are fixed during the following hour1
- Online postgresql admin gui1
- Too much powered servers and add-ons1
- Fast deployment time1
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Cons of Amazon EC2
- Ui could use a lot of work13
- High learning curve when compared to PaaS6
- Extremely poor CPU performance3
Cons of Clever Cloud
- Super expensive2
- Not a whole lot of flexibility1
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