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  5. Amazon EC2 vs DigitalOcean vs Google Compute Engine

Amazon EC2 vs DigitalOcean vs Google Compute Engine

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Stacks48.6K
Followers36.0K
Votes2.5K
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Stacks18.2K
Followers13.3K
Votes2.6K
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Stacks12.4K
Followers9.2K
Votes423

Amazon EC2 vs DigitalOcean vs Google Compute Engine: What are the differences?

  1. Pricing: One of the key differences between Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, and Google Compute Engine is their pricing models. While all three platforms offer pay-as-you-go pricing, Amazon EC2 provides a variety of pricing options including reserved instances and spot instances, which can result in cost savings for users with specific usage patterns. DigitalOcean, on the other hand, offers a simple and transparent pricing structure with flat rates for their virtual machines. Google Compute Engine follows a similar pay-as-you-go model to Amazon EC2 but provides sustained use discounts for instances that run a significant portion of the month.

  2. Data Center Locations: Another major difference lies in the availability of data center locations. Amazon EC2 has data centers distributed globally, allowing users to choose from a wide range of regions for their instances. DigitalOcean, however, has a smaller number of data centers compared to Amazon EC2, which may limit users' choices in terms of proximity to their target audience. Google Compute Engine also has a global network of data centers, providing users with flexibility in selecting regions to host their resources.

  3. Instance Types: The three platforms offer a variety of instance types with different computing capabilities and resource allocations. Amazon EC2 provides a wide range of instances catering to diverse workload requirements, including general-purpose, memory-optimized, and compute-optimized instances. DigitalOcean, although having a simpler offering, provides standard, CPU-optimized, and memory-optimized droplets. Google Compute Engine, similar to Amazon EC2, offers various instance types optimized for different workloads, such as standard, high-memory, and high-CPU instances.

  4. Networking Capabilities: Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, and Google Compute Engine differ in their networking capabilities. Amazon EC2 provides a robust networking infrastructure with features like Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS Direct Connect for enhanced connectivity options. DigitalOcean offers private networking and floating IPs for improved network isolation and scalability. Google Compute Engine includes features like Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and Cloud Load Balancing for secure and scalable networking options.

  5. Integration with Other Services: Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, and Google Compute Engine integrate with other cloud services to enhance their functionality and usability. Amazon EC2 seamlessly integrates with other AWS services like Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and Amazon DynamoDB, providing users with a comprehensive cloud ecosystem. DigitalOcean integrates with services such as Spaces Object Storage and Kubernetes for additional storage and container orchestration capabilities. Google Compute Engine integrates with Google Cloud services like Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery for seamless data storage and processing.

  6. API and Management Tools: The platforms differ in terms of API capabilities and management tools. Amazon EC2 offers a comprehensive API allowing users to automate various tasks and manage resources programmatically. DigitalOcean provides a well-documented API for managing droplets, volumes, and networking configurations. Google Compute Engine offers RESTful APIs for seamless integration of resources and provides tools such as Google Cloud Console and Cloud SDK for efficient management of instances and services.

In Summary, Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, and Google Compute Engine differ in pricing models, data center locations, instance types, networking capabilities, integration with other services, and API and management tools, providing users with a range of options to choose from based on their specific requirements.

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Advice on Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine

Craig
Craig

Principal Consultant at Rootwork InfoTech LLC

Jul 16, 2020

Decided

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.

200k views200k
Comments
Jerome/Zen
Jerome/Zen

Software Engineer

Aug 2, 2020

Needs advice

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.

264k views264k
Comments
Rodrigo
Rodrigo

SRE

Jul 30, 2021

Decided

Albeit restricted to only a few places worlwide compared to its peers in the cloud segment, I am yet to find another provider capable of delivering a score over 5000 (Geekbench) in a benchmark on a single CPU machine, and each machine costs $6 a month. For homelab and experienced users who don't need DBaaS or IaaC's, it's a pretty straightforward choice. A more comprehensive review of Vultr's HF machines can be found here.

70.2k views70.2k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine

It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

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.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.;Reliable – Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.;Secure – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your compute resources.;Inexpensive – Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume.;Easy to Start – Quickly get started with Amazon EC2 by visiting AWS Marketplace to choose preconfigured software on Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You can quickly deploy this software to EC2 via 1-Click launch or with the EC2 console.
We provide all of our users with high-performance SSD Hard Drives, flexible API, and the ability to select to nearest data center location.;SSD Cloud Servers in 55 Seconds;We provide a 99.99% uptime SLA around network, power and virtual server availability. If we fail to deliver, we’ll credit you based on the amount of time that service was unavailable.;All servers come with 1Gb/sec. network interface. Plans start with 1TB per month and increase incrementally.;KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is one of the fastest-growing open source full virtualization solution for Linux. Our KVM virtualized droplets are designed to address a high level of security and performance.;With our SSD hard drives, you can expect much faster disk i/o performance when compared to a traditional storage medium (e.g. SATA).;We have created a simple name spaced API that provides complete control over your virtual private servers.;All cloud servers are built on powerful Hex Core machines with dedicated ECC Ram and RAID SSD storage.;Shared Private Networking enables Droplets to communicate with other Droplets in that same datacenter.;Transfer a copy of your Droplet snapshot to all regions (Amsterdam, San Francisco, and New York).;An intuitive user interface to control all of your virtual servers. Create, resize, rebuild and snapshot with single clicks.;Full featured DNS management allows you to easily manage your domains.;If you ever get locked out of your virtual server, you’ll be able to recover it with full console access.;Automatically set your server to be backed up. Or take a snapshot when you reach a milestone.
High-performance virtual machines- Compute Engine’s Linux VMs are consistently performant, scalable, highly secure and reliable. Supported distros include Debian and CentOS. You can choose from micro-VMs to large instances.;Powered by Google’s global network- Create large compute clusters that benefit from strong and consistent cross-machine bandwidth. Connect to machines in other data centers and to other Google services using Google’s private global fiber network.;(Really) Pay for what you use- Google bills in minute-level increments (with a 10-minute minimum charge), so you don’t pay for unused computing time.;Load balancing- Native load-balancing technology helps you spread incoming network traffic across a pool of instances, so you can achieve maximum performance, throughput and availability at low cost.;Fast and easy provisioning- Quickly deploy large clusters of virtual machines with intuitive tools including a RESTful API, command-line interface and web-based Console. You can also use tools such as RightScale and Scalr to automatically manage your deployment.;Compliance and security- All data written to disk in Compute Engine is encrypted at rest using the AES-128-CBC algorithm. Compute Engine has completed ISO 27001, SSAE-16, SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 certifications, demonstrating our commitment to information security.
Statistics
Stacks
48.6K
Stacks
18.2K
Stacks
12.4K
Followers
36.0K
Followers
13.3K
Followers
9.2K
Votes
2.5K
Votes
2.6K
Votes
423
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 647
    Quick and reliable cloud servers
  • 515
    Scalability
  • 393
    Easy management
  • 277
    Low cost
  • 271
    Auto-scaling
Cons
  • 14
    Ui could use a lot of work
  • 6
    High learning curve when compared to PaaS
  • 3
    Extremely poor CPU performance
Pros
  • 560
    Great value for money
  • 364
    Simple dashboard
  • 362
    Good pricing
  • 300
    Ssds
  • 250
    Nice ui
Cons
  • 4
    Pricing
  • 3
    No live support chat
Pros
  • 87
    Backed by google
  • 79
    Easy to scale
  • 75
    High-performance virtual machines
  • 57
    Performance
  • 52
    Fast and easy provisioning
Integrations
No integrations available
Cloud 66
Cloud 66
RightScale
RightScale
Qubole
Qubole
Scalr
Scalr
Boundary
Boundary
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Red Hat Codeready Workspaces
Kinvey
Kinvey
New Relic
New Relic
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Zencoder
Zencoder

What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine?

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure

Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.

Linode

Linode

Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.

Scaleway

Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

Rackspace Cloud Servers

Rackspace Cloud Servers

Cloud Servers is based on OpenStack, the open and scalable operating system for building public and private clouds. With the open cloud, you get reliable cloud hosting, without locking your data into one proprietary platform.

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform

It helps you build what's next with secure infrastructure, developer tools, APIs, data analytics and machine learning. It is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube.

Gandi

Gandi

Gandi VPS Cloud Hosting offers you a flexible server with dedicated resources. The VPS virtualization is made possible by Xen technology.

WebFaction

WebFaction

No need to spend hours installing and configuring the software, database and other tools. We have over 50 one-click installers in our control panel.

Joyent Cloud

Joyent Cloud

Joyent is the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, offering the only solution specifically built to power real-time web and mobile applications.

Vultr

Vultr

Strategically located in 16 datacenters around the globe and provides frictionless provisioning of public cloud, storage and single-tenant bare metal.

Amazon LightSail

Amazon LightSail

Everything you need to jumpstart your project on AWS—compute, storage, and networking—for a low, predictable price. Launch a virtual private server with just a few clicks.

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