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  5. Amazon EC2 vs Google Compute Engine vs Microsoft Azure

Amazon EC2 vs Google Compute Engine vs Microsoft Azure

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Stacks48.6K
Followers36.0K
Votes2.5K
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Stacks25.6K
Followers17.6K
Votes768
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Stacks12.4K
Followers9.2K
Votes423

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

Introduction

1. Cost Structure: Amazon EC2 offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model with instances available at various price points, while Google Compute Engine provides sustained use discounts which can result in cost savings for long-running workloads. Microsoft Azure offers a hybrid benefit for Windows Server and SQL Server, enabling cost savings for users with on-premises licenses.

2. Instance Types: Amazon EC2 provides a wide range of instance types to cater to different workloads, while Google Compute Engine offers predefined machine types for simplicity and ease of selection. Meanwhile, Microsoft Azure offers a vast selection of instance types tailored for various applications like memory-optimized or compute-optimized workloads.

3. Data Center Locations: Amazon EC2 has a more extensive global presence with data centers in multiple regions worldwide, providing users with flexibility in choosing the location of their instances for reduced latency. Google Compute Engine also has a widespread global footprint but focuses on specific regions like the United States and Europe. In contrast, Microsoft Azure has an extensive network of data centers worldwide, reaching over 60 regions globally.

4. Integration with Other Services: Amazon EC2 seamlessly integrates with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) products, allowing users to create a comprehensive cloud infrastructure easily. Google Compute Engine integrates well with other Google Cloud Platform services, enabling users to leverage a wide range of cloud services within the same ecosystem. Microsoft Azure offers tight integration with various Microsoft services like Active Directory and Office 365, providing a seamless experience for users already utilizing Microsoft products.

5. Management Tools: Amazon EC2 provides a robust set of management tools like CloudWatch for monitoring and Auto Scaling for automatic resource adjustments, enhancing scalability and operational efficiency. Google Compute Engine offers tools like Stackdriver for monitoring and logging, as well as Deployment Manager for infrastructure automation. Microsoft Azure provides Azure Monitor for tracking performance metrics and Azure Automation for streamlining repetitive tasks.

6. Virtual Network Capabilities: Amazon EC2 offers Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for creating isolated network environments and customizable network configurations, providing enhanced security and network isolation. Google Compute Engine offers Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for network isolation and subnetworks for finer control over IP addressing. Microsoft Azure provides Virtual Network for creating isolated networks, subnets for organizing resources, and network security groups for controlling traffic flow.

In Summary, Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure differ in cost structure, instance types, data center locations, integration with other services, management tools, and virtual network capabilities.

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Advice on Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, 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
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
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.

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.

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.
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.
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
25.6K
Stacks
12.4K
Followers
36.0K
Followers
17.6K
Followers
9.2K
Votes
2.5K
Votes
768
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
  • 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
  • 87
    Backed by google
  • 79
    Easy to scale
  • 75
    High-performance virtual machines
  • 57
    Performance
  • 52
    Fast and easy provisioning
Integrations
No integrations available
New Relic
New Relic
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Cloudinary
Cloudinary
Redis Cloud
Redis Cloud
Bitnami
Bitnami
AWS Cloud9
AWS Cloud9
MongoLab
MongoLab
AppDynamics
AppDynamics
Cloudant
Cloudant
CopperEgg
CopperEgg
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, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine?

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean

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.

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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