[Guest98123]

"The numbers given in this article do not account for any AWS reservation. However, they all account for Google sustained use discount (30% automatic discount on instances that ran for the entire month)."

I'll never understand why people keep referencing that 50% cheaper article. They take into account the 30% monthly discount from Google, but ignore the 47% discount I currently get from Amazon by reserving my instances for a year. Why? Well, because the author thinks "Reserved Instances are bullshit!".

Now, I agree reserved instances are not ideal, but if you're trying to write an article about pricing, it's absurd to exclude such a discount. It's obvious the author was just going for click-bait.

[manigandham]

Why? RI's require upfront purchasing, sustained use doesn't. So the comparison is valid because it's comparing on-demand instances from both providers, and Google comes out cheaper.

Otherwise you can say anything has better pricing because you signed a big volume discount upfront, whether you're buying cloud VMs or tires.

[sokoloff]

AWS RIs don't require upfront purchasing (payment). They offer full-upfront; they offer half-upfront; they also offer no-upfront.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/pricin...

[vgt]

Google has released "Committed Use Discounts", an RI competitor, which appears to be ~35% cheaper than RIs on average, according to Rightscale [0].

I also wrote an article discussing why "Committed Use Discounts" is a much bigger deal than just a "price model" at [1].

It'd be great for "thefht" guy to do the comparison, but data's already out there.

(work at Google Cloud)

[0] http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-analysis/aws-reser...

[1] https://hackernoon.com/why-googles-answer-to-aws-reseved-ins...

[buxtehude]

That 47% discount is a discount on AWS on demand (EC2/RDS) prices - not a 47% discount relative to GCP sustained use pricing.

I just finished researching pricing on AWS/GCP for my team - and I found that generally AWS matches GCP pricing (sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower) if you can commit to 1 year.

From what I found through my research, the only way to achieve a significant reduction in price relative to GCP is if you can commit to 3 years on AWS.

However, I found it somewhat difficult to compare apples to apples - as it can be difficult to match CPU and RAM - I had to settle for close enough. There is a very big difference in network bandwidth allowances per type - with GCP being far more generous. Load balancing offerings differ greatly - with GCP seeming much more modern in design (HA, geo-load balancing, anycast static ip, etc.). My point here being that our analysis took into account price as well as other factors.