Overview

Amazon EC2

Stacks48.9K

Followers36.0K

Votes2.5K

Microsoft Azure

Stacks25.2K

Followers17.6K

Votes768

DigitalOcean

Stacks18.3K

Followers13.3K

Votes2.6K

Amazon EC2 vs DigitalOcean vs Microsoft Azure: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Amazon EC2, DigitalOcean, and Microsoft Azure. These three cloud computing platforms offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions, but there are distinct features that set them apart from each other.

Scalability:
- Amazon EC2: EC2 provides automatic scaling capabilities, allowing you to adjust resources based on demand to handle fluctuations in traffic or workload. It offers a wide range of instance types for scalability.
- DigitalOcean: DigitalOcean also supports scaling, but it requires manual intervention. You can vertically scale by upgrading the droplet's plan or use load balancers for horizontal scaling.
- Microsoft Azure: Azure provides both manual and automatic scaling options. You can configure autoscaling rules based on specific metrics to automatically adjust resources. It offers various virtual machine sizes to support scalability needs.
Pricing Model:
- Amazon EC2: EC2 follows a flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing model where you pay for the instance usage per hour. Costs can vary depending on the instance type, operating system, and other factors like data transfer and storage.
- DigitalOcean: DigitalOcean offers fixed pricing plans called "Droplets" that are billed on a monthly or hourly basis. Each Droplet includes a fixed set of resources, and additional resources like storage and network transfer incur additional costs.
- Microsoft Azure: Azure offers various pricing options, including per-hour or per-minute billing for virtual machines. The pricing depends on factors like instance size, storage, and the chosen billing option.
Services and Offerings:
- Amazon EC2: EC2 provides a wide range of services and integrations, including load balancing, auto scaling, data storage, and networking capabilities. It also offers a vast marketplace of pre-configured virtual machine images.
- DigitalOcean: DigitalOcean focuses on simplicity and offers a streamlined set of services like droplets, managed databases, block storage, and load balancers. It provides straightforward options without overwhelming complexity.
- Microsoft Azure: Azure provides a comprehensive set of services and focuses on enterprise-grade solutions. It offers a wide range of services like virtual machines, databases, AI, analytics, IoT, and more. Azure also integrates well with other Microsoft products and services.
Platform Maturity:
- Amazon EC2: EC2 is one of the earliest and most established cloud platforms, offering a mature and robust infrastructure. It has a vast and loyal customer base and extensive documentation and community support.
- DigitalOcean: DigitalOcean is a relatively newer player but has gained popularity for its simplicity and developer-friendly features. It offers a clean user interface and a straightforward learning curve.
- Microsoft Azure: Azure is a robust and mature cloud platform, backed by Microsoft's extensive resources and ecosystem. It has a strong enterprise focus and is well-suited for hybrid cloud deployments.
Global Availability:
- Amazon EC2: EC2 provides a global infrastructure with multiple regions and availability zones worldwide. It offers the ability to deploy instances in different geographic locations to improve latency and redundancy.
- DigitalOcean: DigitalOcean initially started with a limited number of data centers but has expanded its global presence. It currently operates data centers in multiple regions, but the availability may vary compared to larger cloud providers.
- Microsoft Azure: Azure has a significant global presence with data centers spread across various regions. It offers a high degree of availability and allows you to deploy resources in multiple regions to ensure redundancy.
Integration with Other Services:
- Amazon EC2: EC2 seamlessly integrates with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings, allowing you to leverage various cloud services like S3, RDS, Lambda, and more.
- DigitalOcean: DigitalOcean provides some integrations with third-party tools and services but has a more limited ecosystem compared to larger cloud providers.
- Microsoft Azure: Azure offers deep integration with various Microsoft services like Office 365, Active Directory, Dynamics 365, and others. It provides a cohesive environment for Microsoft-centric organizations.

In Summary, while all three platforms offer cloud infrastructure services, Amazon EC2 stands out with its scalability and vast service offerings, while DigitalOcean emphasizes simplicity and cost-effectiveness, and Microsoft Azure provides enterprise-grade solutions with strong integration capabilities.

Advice on Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean

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

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

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	Microsoft Azure	DigitalOcean
It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.	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.	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.
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.	Use your OS, language, database, tool;Global datacenter footprint;Enterprise Grade with up to a 99.95% monthly SLA;Web Sites- Get started for free and scale up as your traffic grows. Build with ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js and deploy in seconds with FTP, Git or TFS.;Infrastructure Services- Access scalable, on-demand infrastructure using Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks. Take advantage of what you already know to achieve new capabilities in the cloud.;Mobile Services- App development with a scalable and secure backend hosted in Windows Azure. Incorporate structured storage, user authentication and push notifications in minutes.;Cloud Services- Create highly-available, infinitely scalable applications and services using a rich Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment. Support multi-tier scenarios, automated deployments and elastic scale.;Big Data- Process, analyze, and gain new insights from big data using the power of Apache Hadoop.;Media- Create, manage and distribute media in the cloud. This PaaS offering provides everything from encoding to content protection to streaming and analytics support.	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.
Statistics
Stacks 48.9K	Stacks 25.2K	Stacks 18.3K
Followers 36.0K	Followers 17.6K	Followers 13.3K
Votes 2.5K	Votes 768	Votes 2.6K
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 114 Scales well and quite easy 96 Can use .Net or open source tools 81 Startup friendly 73 Startup plans via BizSpark 62 High performance Cons 7 Confusing UI 2 Expensive plesk on Azure	Pros 560 Great value for money 364 Simple dashboard 362 Good pricing 300 Ssds 250 Nice ui Cons 3 Pricing 3 No live support chat
Integrations
No integrations available	New Relic Twilio SendGrid Cloudinary Redis Cloud Bitnami AWS Cloud9 MongoLab AppDynamics Cloudant CopperEgg	Cloud 66

What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, DigitalOcean?

Google Compute Engine

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.

Linode

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

Scaleway

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

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

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

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

Vultr

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

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.