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  5. Amazon EC2 vs Microsoft Azure vs Scaleway

Amazon EC2 vs Microsoft Azure vs Scaleway

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Stacks48.6K
Followers36.0K
Votes2.5K
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Stacks25.6K
Followers17.6K
Votes768
Scaleway
Scaleway
Stacks198
Followers182
Votes200

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

# Key Differences Between Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Scaleway

Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Scaleway are all popular cloud computing platforms that offer a variety of services. Below are the key differences between these three platforms.

1. **Pricing Structure**: One of the key differences between Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Scaleway is their pricing structure. Amazon EC2 offers pay-as-you-go pricing, where users pay for what they use by the hour. Microsoft Azure also offers pay-as-you-go pricing but allows users to prepay for services. On the other hand, Scaleway offers fixed-price instances where users pay a flat rate regardless of usage.

2. **Supported Operating Systems**: Another significant difference is the variety of supported operating systems. Amazon EC2 supports a wide range of operating systems, including Windows and various flavors of Linux. Microsoft Azure primarily supports Windows Server, but also offers support for Linux distributions. Scaleway, on the other hand, focuses on Linux-based operating systems, providing various distributions such as Ubuntu, CentOS, and Debian.

3. **Scalability Options**: When it comes to scalability, each platform offers different options. Amazon EC2 provides Auto Scaling capabilities that automatically adjust resources based on demand, allowing for seamless scalability. Microsoft Azure also offers Auto Scaling features, but additionally provides Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets for managing a group of virtual machines. Scaleway offers vertical scaling options that allow users to increase the resources of an instance, but doesn't have Auto Scaling capabilities.

4. **Global Data Centers**: Another difference is the global presence of data centers. Amazon EC2 has a vast network of data centers worldwide, offering users the flexibility to choose the location that best suits their needs. Microsoft Azure also has a global presence with data centers in various regions. In comparison, Scaleway has fewer data centers primarily located in Europe, which may impact users requiring access to servers in other regions.

5. **Services Offered**: Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Scaleway all offer a range of services, but the depth and breadth of offerings vary. Amazon EC2 has a vast array of services beyond compute instances, including storage, databases, and AI tools. Microsoft Azure provides a wide range of services as well, with a particular focus on integration with Microsoft products and services. Scaleway, while offering essential cloud services, has a more limited portfolio compared to Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.

In Summary, the key differences between Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Scaleway lie in their pricing structure, supported operating systems, scalability options, global data centers, and the range of services offered.

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Advice on Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Scaleway

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
Scaleway
Scaleway

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.

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

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.
A fantastic user experience that gives you the power to spawn your servers in two clicks.;Uptime and response time guarantee for mission critical services backed by our 24x7 support team.
Statistics
Stacks
48.6K
Stacks
25.6K
Stacks
198
Followers
36.0K
Followers
17.6K
Followers
182
Votes
2.5K
Votes
768
Votes
200
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
  • 30
    Scalable
  • 25
    Dedicated
  • 25
    Cost effective
  • 21
    Bare-metal
  • 14
    Open source
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
Terraform
Terraform
Packer
Packer
Salt
Salt
Docker Machine
Docker Machine

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

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.

Google Compute Engine

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

Linode

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

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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