Amazon EC2 vs Google Compute Engine vs Microsoft Azure

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Amazon EC2

48.5K
35.8K
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Google Compute Engine

12.3K
9.1K
+ 1
423
Microsoft Azure

24.9K
17.4K
+ 1
768

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.

Decisions about Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure

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.

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Tejas Sangoi
Founder, CEO at Thalia Technologies · | 4 upvotes · 43.8K views

Our company builds micro saas applications. Based on the application we decide whether to deploy it over one of our shared servers or on a dedicated server.

We decided to Lightsail over EC2.

  1. Lightsail is a lightweight, simplified product offering that has a dramatically simplified console. The instances run in a special VPC, but this aspect is also provisioned automatically, and invisible in the console.

  2. Lightsail supports optionally peering this hidden VPC with your default VPC in the same AWS region, allowing Lightsail instances to access services like EC2 and RDS in the default VPC within the same AWS account.

  3. Bandwidth is unlimited, but of course free bandwidth is not -- however, Lightsail instances do include a significant monthly bandwidth allowance before any bandwidth-related charges apply.

  4. It has predictable pricing with no surprises at the end.

  5. The flexibility of EC2 leads inevitably to complexity. Whereas for Lighsail there is virtually no learning curve, here. You don't even technically need to know how to use SSH with a private key -- the Lightsail console even has a built-in SSH client -- but there is no requirement that you use it. You can access these instances normally, with a standard SSH client.

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Jerome/Zen Quah
Shared insights
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Amazon EC2Amazon EC2DigitalOceanDigitalOcean

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.

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Craig Finch
Principal Consultant at Rootwork InfoTech · | 6 upvotes · 194.8K views

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.

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Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 2 upvotes · 197.7K views

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.

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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.

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Pros of Amazon EC2
Pros of Google Compute Engine
Pros of Microsoft Azure
  • 647
    Quick and reliable cloud servers
  • 515
    Scalability
  • 393
    Easy management
  • 277
    Low cost
  • 271
    Auto-scaling
  • 89
    Market leader
  • 80
    Backed by amazon
  • 79
    Reliable
  • 67
    Free tier
  • 58
    Easy management, scalability
  • 13
    Flexible
  • 10
    Easy to Start
  • 9
    Widely used
  • 9
    Web-scale
  • 9
    Elastic
  • 7
    Node.js API
  • 5
    Industry Standard
  • 4
    Lots of configuration options
  • 2
    GPU instances
  • 1
    Simpler to understand and learn
  • 1
    Extremely simple to use
  • 1
    Amazing for individuals
  • 1
    All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.
  • 87
    Backed by google
  • 79
    Easy to scale
  • 75
    High-performance virtual machines
  • 57
    Performance
  • 52
    Fast and easy provisioning
  • 15
    Load balancing
  • 12
    Compliance and security
  • 9
    Kubernetes
  • 8
    GitHub Integration
  • 7
    Consistency
  • 4
    Free $300 credit (12 months)
  • 3
    One Click Setup Options
  • 3
    Good documentation
  • 2
    Great integration and product support
  • 2
    Escort
  • 2
    Ease of Use and GitHub support
  • 1
    Nice UI
  • 1
    Easy Snapshot and Backup feature
  • 1
    Integration with mobile notification services
  • 1
    Low cost
  • 1
    Support many OS
  • 1
    Very Reliable
  • 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
  • 38
    Wide choice of services
  • 32
    Low cost
  • 32
    Lots of integrations
  • 31
    Reliability
  • 19
    Twillio & Github are directly accessible
  • 13
    RESTful API
  • 10
    PaaS
  • 10
    Enterprise Grade
  • 10
    Startup support
  • 8
    DocumentDB
  • 7
    In person support
  • 6
    Free for students
  • 6
    Service Bus
  • 6
    Virtual Machines
  • 5
    Redis Cache
  • 5
    It rocks
  • 4
    Storage, Backup, and Recovery
  • 4
    Infrastructure Services
  • 4
    SQL Databases
  • 4
    CDN
  • 3
    Integration
  • 3
    Scheduler
  • 3
    Preview Portal
  • 3
    HDInsight
  • 3
    Built on Node.js
  • 3
    Big Data
  • 3
    BizSpark 60k Azure Benefit
  • 3
    IaaS
  • 2
    Backup
  • 2
    Open cloud
  • 2
    Web
  • 2
    SaaS
  • 2
    Big Compute
  • 2
    Mobile
  • 2
    Media
  • 2
    Dev-Test
  • 2
    Storage
  • 2
    StorSimple
  • 2
    Machine Learning
  • 2
    Stream Analytics
  • 2
    Data Factory
  • 2
    Event Hubs
  • 2
    Virtual Network
  • 2
    ExpressRoute
  • 2
    Traffic Manager
  • 2
    Media Services
  • 2
    BizTalk Services
  • 2
    Site Recovery
  • 2
    Active Directory
  • 2
    Multi-Factor Authentication
  • 2
    Visual Studio Online
  • 2
    Application Insights
  • 2
    Automation
  • 2
    Operational Insights
  • 2
    Key Vault
  • 2
    Infrastructure near your customers
  • 2
    Easy Deployment
  • 1
    Enterprise customer preferences
  • 1
    Documentation
  • 1
    Security
  • 1
    Best cloud platfrom
  • 1
    Easy and fast to start with
  • 1
    Remote Debugging

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Cons of Amazon EC2
Cons of Google Compute Engine
Cons of Microsoft Azure
  • 14
    Ui could use a lot of work
  • 6
    High learning curve when compared to PaaS
  • 3
    Extremely poor CPU performance
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 7
      Confusing UI
    • 2
      Expensive plesk on Azure

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    What is Amazon EC2?

    It 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 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.

    What is 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.

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    What companies use Amazon EC2?
    What companies use Google Compute Engine?
    What companies use Microsoft Azure?

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    What tools integrate with Amazon EC2?
    What tools integrate with Google Compute Engine?
    What tools integrate with Microsoft Azure?

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    What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure?
    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.
    Amazon S3
    Amazon Simple Storage Service provides a fully redundant data storage infrastructure for storing and retrieving any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web
    Amazon EC2 Container Service
    Amazon EC2 Container Service lets you launch and stop container-enabled applications with simple API calls, allows you to query the state of your cluster from a centralized service, and gives you access to many familiar Amazon EC2 features like security groups, EBS volumes and IAM roles.
    Beanstalk
    A single process to commit code, review with the team, and deploy the final result to your customers.
    NGINX
    nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.
    See all alternatives