You bring up a good point. Amazon does give you a better "vertical scaling" story. I'll still challenge you on the "breadth" when it comes to EC2 - the philosop

You bring up a good point. Amazon does give you a better "vertical scaling" story. I'll still challenge you on the "breadth" when it comes to EC2 - the philosophy is just very different. Why do you need a "IO optimized instance" if you want just fast disk - that notion just seems very foreign and arbitrarily-constrained on Google Cloud. You bring up Local SSD. Google's Local SSD is just badass by comparison: - 680,000 Read and 360,000 Write IOPS included in the cost [0] - $0.218 per GB per month. Instance cost is separate. - Again, you can attach these to any instance type (hence the point on fragmentation of instances on EC2) - AWS goes up to 365,000 Read and 315,000 "First Write" IOPS. Only if you buy an i2.8xlarge [2] - An i2.8xlarge is $6.82 per hour. You do the math :) And someone else did more comparisons here [1] [0] https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/performance [1] https://medium.com/google-cloud/new-google-cloud-ssds-have-amazing-price-to-performance-2a58e7d9b433#.r131j8yfe https://medium.com/google-cloud/new-google-cloud-ssds-have-a... [2] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/i2-instances.html#i2-instances-diskperf http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/i2-instan...