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Amazon EC2 vs SoftLayer: What are the differences?
# Introduction
1. **Virtual Machine Instances**: Amazon EC2 offers "On-Demand" instances, where you pay for compute capacity by the hour or second. SoftLayer provides virtual machine instances with fixed monthly fees, allowing for more predictable cost management.
2. **Network Performance**: Amazon EC2 instances have higher network performance with options for enhanced networking. SoftLayer offers a high-performance network with a global private network backbone.
3. **Regional Availability**: Amazon EC2 has a wider range of regions globally compared to SoftLayer, providing more options for geographical redundancy and low-latency.
4. **Instance Customization**: SoftLayer offers more customizable options for virtual machine instances, including the ability to build your own instances with specific hardware configurations. Amazon EC2 has predefined instance types with limited customization options.
5. **Management Tools**: Amazon EC2 provides a comprehensive set of management tools and APIs for automation and monitoring, while SoftLayer offers a more traditional approach with a focus on manual management and client portal access.
6. **Service Level Agreements (SLAs)**: Amazon EC2 offers SLAs for uptime and performance guarantees, while SoftLayer provides more customizable SLAs to meet specific customer requirements.
In Summary, Amazon EC2 and SoftLayer differ in terms of virtual machine instances, network performance, regional availability, instance customization, management tools, and Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pros of Amazon EC2
- Quick and reliable cloud servers647
- Scalability515
- Easy management393
- Low cost277
- Auto-scaling271
- Market leader89
- Backed by amazon80
- Reliable79
- Free tier67
- Easy management, scalability58
- Flexible13
- Easy to Start10
- Widely used9
- Web-scale9
- Elastic9
- Node.js API7
- Industry Standard5
- Lots of configuration options4
- GPU instances2
- Simpler to understand and learn1
- Extremely simple to use1
- Amazing for individuals1
- All the Open Source CLI tools you could want.1
Pros of SoftLayer
- Dedicated hardware24
- Great support17
- Good pricing12
- Many upgrades8
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Cons of Amazon EC2
- Ui could use a lot of work13
- High learning curve when compared to PaaS6
- Extremely poor CPU performance3
Cons of SoftLayer
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What is Amazon EC2?
What is SoftLayer?
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