A Tale of Two Clouds: Amazon vs. Google

[raboukhalil]

Hi everyone, author here. I wrote this article to summarize my thoughts on using the Google Cloud vs Amazon.

TL;DR: Although AWS has a lot more cloud products, unless you need the additional options, IMHO the Google Cloud is more intuitive, cheaper and offers better cost structure (e.g. by-the-minute pricing instead of by-the-hour).

So if you’re starting a new project, I would highly recommend that you give the Google Cloud a try.

[saurik]

Yo! Totally legitimate question, as I don't know the answer to this, and I'm extremely curious: I see a lot of people say that Google is cheaper than Amazon, but I also see a lot of people bemoaning reserved instances and buried in every comment thread about Google vs. Amazon someone points out "wait, this comparison isn't taking into account reserved instances". I thereby don't feel like I actually know which offering is cheaper (though I'm betting it is Google, mostly for the same reasons I don't really want to use their offering, which is maybe unfortunate: that I hate free tiers and artificially low prices, as they either turn into a tax somewhere else or a reason to later scrap a product line). Can you verify that your comparison with 25% cheaper is based on actually paying attention to the pricing structure of the two products? What I'd like to see is "assuming you are going to use a computer for two or three years, and are willing to spend the twenty minutes to save potentially thousands of dollars (as if you aren't, something is wrong with your priorities ;P <- note that I'm willing to admit my priorities are also broken :/...), here is the cost difference between these two offerings".

[brooklynmarket]

We actually use Google's Firebase to manage our Alexa skill, delivering content from S3, best of both worlds.

[raboukhalil]

That's a really interesting approach, thanks for sharing!

[advisedwang]

This blog post really just compares EC2 vs GCE. That's a valuable comparison to make, but covers a fairly narrow use case. I'd love to see comparisons that that say "for EDW X wins over Y", "for high volume message passing Z is best", "for data archival Q wins" etc

[gnrlist]

If price is your thing, Linode for compute and Backblaze for storage; 4 CPU and 8GB RAM for $40 a month and 1/2 cent per month per gig. For full feature cloud I find Azure a better competitor to AWS as far as features/price/interface and per minute billing.

[msh]

well only linode if security is not your thing... They have a history of security issues.

I think this is the latest in a long line: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/09/linode_ssh_security...

[marianattestad]

Nice article. Good explanation of what some of the major numbers and features mean in a practical sense.

[emveeoh]

Basically, an advertisement for Google barely disguised as an 'article'.

[raboukhalil]

Sorry you feel that way, are there any points you disagree with?

I'm in no way affiliated with or remunerated by Google. I've just spent a lot of time in the past comparing both and wanted to share that with the community.