[uuyi]

These comparisons are fairly meaningless even on IaaS only class deployments. Instance costs aren't necessarily the biggest cost or the best cost optimisation path in the cloud.

For example our S3 costs are higher than our EC2 costs and we made a productive saving implementing lifecycle and S3 IA migration. The biggest EC2 cost reduction we made was through careful analysis and moving some stuff to Lambda, not by changing provider or instance class optimisation.

Whatever happens though, you don't know what the costs are going to be until you get the first bill, regardless of what you estimate.

[stingraycharles]

I fully agree with this: to generalize, it’s useless to look at just prices, you really need to take performance and other parts into consideration too.

For example, we rely heavily on storage (with deployments in the 100TB - 1PB range), where we have a lot of churn in data and as such require a lot of throughput. AWS’s GP3 EBS volumes offer 1GB/sec throughout each at a really attractive price, there simply isn’t any comparable offering for this at Azure at that price point (only the ultra premium SSD variant, which is more like IO2 EBS).

Does anyone know whether there are any real in-depth studies and comparisons between performance of cloud providers, on the level of, say, the STAC benchmarks?

[tatersolid]

Azure Premium P80 disks offer 900 MB/s provisioned throughput plus higher bursts. 32 TiB in size though, so not a fit for use cases where you just want small but fast disks. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/disk...