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I'm a longtime AWS user. Recently I decided to see how the competitor clouds offering stack up - because I've read a lot about how the second-movers in the spac

I'm a longtime AWS user. Recently I decided to see how the competitor clouds offering stack up - because I've read a lot about how the second-movers in the space have caught up to Amazon. And that now there's basically no difference between the offerings. I decided first to try Google - specifically Google App Engine. Just to see if I could get a plain vanilla base case working quickly. And my initial reaction was that AWS is still head-and-shoulders above everyone (or at least Google). The Google UI and setup process seemed ridiculously complicated and unfriendly. With AWS, I was up and running almost immediately. Not so with Google. So I immediately ran back to AWS and dropped Google. I'm not sure if my bad experience with Google was because I had framed my expectations through my AWS experience and thus wasn't able to use Google the way it intended to be used. But it just seemed way too unfriendly. It seemed to require needless dev installs that should just be automated. When I went back to AWS, just the sheer amount of services they offer seemed staggering by comparison. Google still has products in BETA that AWS has in mature mode. I was going to try out other competitors like Azure, Digital Ocean, etc. but now feel like there's no need. AWS is just good.

adventured 12y ago
Digital Ocean really shouldn't be compared to AWS for anything other than EC2. For that, Digital Ocean is pretty amazing, and at least as easy to use as AWS in my experience. The value proposition is far greater for Digital Ocean, if all you need is EC2. The 3tb of bandwidth you'll get on a $20 DO account is alone worth ~$300 on AWS. Linode is similar, in terms of value proposition and ease of use.
- sciurus 12y ago
  What are the Digital Ocean equivalents to EC2 resources like AutoScaling Groups and Elastic Load Balancers?
  - joelhaasnoot 12y ago
    Your own monitoring and bash scripts
    - jacobkranz 12y ago
      From contacting their support, one of the features they are currently working on is a load balancer
crb 12y ago
Can you elaborate re. Google? Google App Engine is more comparable to Heroku, so as a "longtime AWS user" you might be more comfortable with Google Compute Engine.
- oxymoron 12y ago
  Well, there's Elastic Beanstalk on AWS which is pretty much the same thing.
matthewmacleod 12y ago
I'm finding this testimonial a bit difficult to believe. App Engine is very obviously a different product from the whole AWS stable, and that's something that you should be aware of if you're in a position to be comparing them. AWS is a high-quality, extensive offering, but it's not suitable for every situation. The 'sheer amount of services' are in some cases lacklustre reimplementations of services you could run yourself on EC2, for example. What this boiled down to is "I wanted to compare things to AWS, so I had a half-assed look at something that really isn't a competitor then immediately stopped looking." That's not really convincing.
- jpgvm 12y ago
  It's also missing a lot of important functionality if you are trying to implement anything other than the basic case. A perfect example would be the difference between GCE networking and AWS VPC. GCE networks support routes with priorities and if you insert multiple routes into the routing table with equal priorities it does what you would expect, equal cost multi-pathing. This makes it really easy to implement proper scalable NAT for private instances, which is just pure pain in AWS VPC. There are many more examples of this and AWS is not the only culprit, both GCE and Azure have either missing features or mis-features that make me want to flip a desk sometimes.
fearandclothing 12y ago
I really don't think GAE is comparable to AWS in that way. GAE offers "platform as a service," where the actual infrastructure (e.g. configuring actual servers, virtual or otherwise) is abstracted away from you as a customer. A more fair comparison would be Google Compute Engine, which is an "infrastructure as a service" product like AWS.
ademarre 12y ago
I've been using AWS for years, and I think it's great that it's getting to be mature. I'd be cautious about comparing cloud vendors by the number of services they offer though. As cloud users and developers, we should be pushing for standardization between vendors. I dislike having a huge ecosystem of proprietary cloud products to learn before I can do anything useful with them. I try to stick to IaaS offerings because it's easier to evade vendor lock-in that way. I'm happy to see Docker taking off, because it gives us a useful abstraction and platform that we can take with us across cloud vendors. (And isn't it interesting that AWS is rolling out their own Docker management platform? I think that's a good thing, but it's also true that AWS has an incentive to compete with more open systems like Kubernetes rather than adopt one.)
mdnormy 12y ago
I came from sysadmin background and regularly have to compare AWS, Azure & GAE. My company is PHP shop which use only IaaS & PaaS. Basically nothing beats AWS on IaaS and Azure seems to be the best for PaaS. I'm comparing in term of cost, feature and ease of implementation/maintainability.
ternaryoperator 12y ago
So you compared an IaaS (AWS) with a PaaS (GAE) and found different performance profiles.

adventured 12y ago

Digital Ocean really shouldn't be compared to AWS for anything other than EC2. For that, Digital Ocean is pretty amazing, and at least as easy to use as AWS in my experience. The value proposition is far greater for Digital Ocean, if all you need is EC2. The 3tb of bandwidth you'll get on a $20 DO account is alone worth ~$300 on AWS. Linode is similar, in terms of value proposition and ease of use.

sciurus 12y ago
What are the Digital Ocean equivalents to EC2 resources like AutoScaling Groups and Elastic Load Balancers?
- joelhaasnoot 12y ago
  Your own monitoring and bash scripts
  - jacobkranz 12y ago
    From contacting their support, one of the features they are currently working on is a load balancer

crb 12y ago

Can you elaborate re. Google? Google App Engine is more comparable to Heroku, so as a "longtime AWS user" you might be more comfortable with Google Compute Engine.

oxymoron 12y ago
Well, there's Elastic Beanstalk on AWS which is pretty much the same thing.

matthewmacleod 12y ago

I'm finding this testimonial a bit difficult to believe. App Engine is very obviously a different product from the whole AWS stable, and that's something that you should be aware of if you're in a position to be comparing them. AWS is a high-quality, extensive offering, but it's not suitable for every situation. The 'sheer amount of services' are in some cases lacklustre reimplementations of services you could run yourself on EC2, for example. What this boiled down to is "I wanted to compare things to AWS, so I had a half-assed look at something that really isn't a competitor then immediately stopped looking." That's not really convincing.

jpgvm 12y ago
It's also missing a lot of important functionality if you are trying to implement anything other than the basic case. A perfect example would be the difference between GCE networking and AWS VPC. GCE networks support routes with priorities and if you insert multiple routes into the routing table with equal priorities it does what you would expect, equal cost multi-pathing. This makes it really easy to implement proper scalable NAT for private instances, which is just pure pain in AWS VPC. There are many more examples of this and AWS is not the only culprit, both GCE and Azure have either missing features or mis-features that make me want to flip a desk sometimes.

fearandclothing 12y ago

I really don't think GAE is comparable to AWS in that way. GAE offers "platform as a service," where the actual infrastructure (e.g. configuring actual servers, virtual or otherwise) is abstracted away from you as a customer. A more fair comparison would be Google Compute Engine, which is an "infrastructure as a service" product like AWS.

ademarre 12y ago

I've been using AWS for years, and I think it's great that it's getting to be mature. I'd be cautious about comparing cloud vendors by the number of services they offer though. As cloud users and developers, we should be pushing for standardization between vendors. I dislike having a huge ecosystem of proprietary cloud products to learn before I can do anything useful with them. I try to stick to IaaS offerings because it's easier to evade vendor lock-in that way. I'm happy to see Docker taking off, because it gives us a useful abstraction and platform that we can take with us across cloud vendors. (And isn't it interesting that AWS is rolling out their own Docker management platform? I think that's a good thing, but it's also true that AWS has an incentive to compete with more open systems like Kubernetes rather than adopt one.)

mdnormy 12y ago

I came from sysadmin background and regularly have to compare AWS, Azure & GAE. My company is PHP shop which use only IaaS & PaaS. Basically nothing beats AWS on IaaS and Azure seems to be the best for PaaS. I'm comparing in term of cost, feature and ease of implementation/maintainability.

ternaryoperator 12y ago

So you compared an IaaS (AWS) with a PaaS (GAE) and found different performance profiles.