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Amazon AWS vs Google Compute Engine comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 16, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon AWS
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
254
Ranking in other categories
PaaS Clouds (2nd)
Google Compute Engine
Ranking in Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
10th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS) category, the mindshare of Amazon AWS is 15.3%, down from 22.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Compute Engine is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Infrastructure as a Service Clouds (IaaS)
 

Featured Reviews

Arun Srivastav - PeerSpot reviewer
Allows for automatic scaling of resources and provides built-in firewalls and security features, eliminating the need for external security solutions
One thing that's a bit different is that we're still accustomed to speaking to someone directly. AWS doesn't offer that kind of support. It's only through bots. You're speaking to chatbots, and that can sometimes be frustrating because there's no person on the other side. AI is not a substitute for a person. AWS marketplace is very strong, but somehow AWS doesn't promote it much. They have a huge customer base across the globe, and if products were launched in their marketplace, they could sell like hotcakes. They should improve their marketplace and promote the same product across the globe. They can take a cut, but they should promote it. That's something they don't do very much. So, AWS should promote its marketplace software. The company should promote it aggressively. Currently, they keep it very subtle. If you ask for it, they'll help you out. But they don't seem to advertise, "You're building a product on our platform? Why don't you sell it in our marketplace?" Improvement in AI: AWS is a little behind Microsoft Azure in terms of AI. AWS is still getting there, but the kind of examples and help files available in Azure for AI are much better. So AWS still needs to work on its AI functionality.
Arundeep Veerabhadraiah - PeerSpot reviewer
A highly scalable and seamless platform which is easily automated
One of GCE's best features is the managed instance groups. We typically use managed instance groups for high availability. You can set certain parameters for managed instance groups where if the load of the computer or server increases beyond 80%, for example, the solution will automatically spawn another instance, and the load will be automatically divided between two systems. If the load is 80% of one of the VMs or GCEs, once the load is divided, it comes down to 40%, so the availability of your systems goes up. However, that all depends on the parameters or configurations we put on the instance group. You also have regular health checks on these managed instance groups, which are configurable. If these health checks determine something wrong with the VM, they will automatically kick off or spawn a new GCE instance. This way, the outage time is less. Previously, on-premises, unless somebody reported the issue to the helpdesk saying that a particular service was unavailable, then a support team would need to troubleshoot what went wrong, which takes a long time. At least 30 minutes to one hour. But by using these managed instance groups, we can reduce the outage time, and second, we can configure them with minimal resources, bringing down our cost. And if the load increases, the managed instance groups automatically respond to new things. Subsequently, our costs decrease. We have a wide range of VMs. There are general-purpose VMs that can be used for hosting general-purpose applications. If some of our applications are memory intensive, then we have a lot of VMs in the M1 series. We can use a range of memory-optimized VMs for these things. We have C-series VMs for compute-intensive applications. If we use some mathematical formulas and require a very high throughput from that, there are GPU-optimized VMs used for machine learning or 3D visualizations in rendering software. GPU-enabled VMs are pretty powerful and responsive. Again, the best part is that we can spin them up when we need them, and once we're done with our work, we can shut them down, allowing tremendous cost savings for any customer. Previously, if we wanted a very high-configuration VM, we had to own the entire hardware and have it on our on-prem data center. And once we'd done with a particular activity, the system would just be lying there on our premises. That is not the case now. We use and decommission it, so we're only billed for the time we're using the product. One of the best things is the preemptible VMs or Spot VMs. These are the cheapest VMs in Google Cloud, but it has a string attached to it where Google can shut down these VMs whenever Google teams split. You only get about 90 seconds notice before they shut down this particular VM. There are scenarios where customers can use these preemptible VMs, for example, when running a batch job. Batch jobs are run once or twice daily, depending on the customer's requirement. Once we are done running these batches, we can decommission the VM. Even if, in the middle of this batch job, Google shuts down these VMs, we can pick up the processing from wherever the VM left off. These are some of the beautiful things we have on Google Cloud concerning the Compute Engine.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I especially like the flexibility and scalability of the solution."
"I like the technical support."
"A scalable and secure product"
"The capacity to grow dynamically based on our needs is most valuable. We can increase resources dynamically. It is also very reliable and fast to implement."
"For testing, it is a cheap alternative to having to build your own labs."
"The solution offers a low footprint. We don't have to come up with a data center ourselves. We basically don't have to own any hardware. We just rent a slice of their platform and we have everything we need."
"The solution can scale well."
"AWS has a lot of flexibility, which is great."
"Google is managing all hardware. You don't need to provision or pre-provision your computer engine."
"I recommend the tool to others since it has high availability features, scalability, and stability."
"The support for ephemeral instances has been particularly valuable for me. It allows me to significantly reduce costs for temporary virtual machines by automatically destroying them once they are no longer needed, which can result in cost savings of up to 90 percent. Additionally, the solution is easy to use."
"The overall product rating is nine out of ten."
"Google Compute is highly scalable."
"The main motive for choosing Google Compute Engine is pricing."
"One of GCE's best features is the managed instance groups."
"The solution helps to direct SSH into the machine at the click of a button. It also helps to deploy container images right from the UI. There is no need to manage the containers on the machine. I also like the tool’s Spot provision model."
 

Cons

"The networking is overly complex."
"I'd like the solution to be more plug-and-play."
"It has the technical support features, but they need to be improved. It has lots of users, but they need to be managed accordingly."
"One thing that's a bit different is that we're still accustomed to speaking to someone directly. AWS doesn't offer that kind of support. It's only through bots."
"Its subscription model or pricing model is too complex, which should be improved."
"Integration with in-house applications could be simplified."
"Many of our clients prefer in-house cloud rather than the application data sitting in the infrastructure owned and managed by Amazon."
"One of the issues I'm facing is that my RDS SQL Server version 5.8 is reaching its end of life, and I need to upgrade it to a customer-wanted version. I want to do this on Graviton instances, but Graviton only starts with version 8.0 and currently doesn't support the 5.8 series. We've raised a Priority Feature Request (PFR) with AWS to have this functionality added for at least three months. This would give us enough time to upgrade our database to the 8.0 version without any issues."
"The licensing process is not a very straightforward process."
"Sometimes support takes time to reply."
"Sometimes support takes time to reply."
"Google Compute Engine needs to have multi-region support. It would also be nice to have a tracking mechanism."
"The biggest problem is that it's got a very archaean and complex security environment that has to be very carefully set up and is easy to break."
"It is not very user-friendly for non-experienced users"
"I would like to improve the solution’s UI while deploying a container. It is sometimes hard to figure out the container’s details and format that you want to deploy. The tool does not give you a guide to find out the error and why the container is not starting up which could be because you have configured it wrong. This is always a hit on the setup."
"There have been instances when a customer has tried to deploy a certain number of VMs inside a project, and they come across quota issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon AWS could have more options and transparency in its pricing model. You need in-depth knowledge to adopt AWS. So someone without that knowledge base might not understand all of the costs associated with AWS."
"Monthly licensing fee."
"The price for AWS is good."
"The Oracle licensing is higher than it is with Amazon AWS."
"It is subscription-based, and we are happy with its pricing."
"It's pay-as-you-go... but I think the pricing becomes a problem as the IT organization grows. They need to give better pricing when companies grow."
"Maintain a good budget, plan the consumption"
"We are reducing costs year-over-year."
"Google Compute Engine's pricing is flexible and the best of all other alternatives."
"The tool is reasonably priced, considering its scalability features. If we want to extend the server's capacity, we can do it, and I think it's reasonable."
"Google Compute Engine is not the least expensive solution. Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft One, are offering a less expensive solution. The price is based on usage. Whenever we use it, we have to pay for only usage. It is a pay-as-you-go model."
"I rate GCE's pricing a five out of ten since it's affordable."
"In terms of improvement, one is definitely the licensing piece. So there is a feature, the BYOL (Bring Your Own License) licensing piece, to bring your own license. It is not that straightforward. It requires some support from Google to get it sorted, access those licenses, and configure those licenses."
"Google is providing money for learning Google Compute Engine. They offer a $300 free trial to new customers. Any beginner can easily get started."
"It's $60,000 to $70,000 a month to replace about $10,000 a month in data center costs."
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Comparison Review

it_user8586 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 14, 2013
Amazon vs Rackspace vs Microsoft vs Google: Cloud Hosting Services Comparison
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace OpenStack, Microsoft Windows Azure and Google are the major cloud hosting and storage service providers. Athough Amazon is top of them and is oldest in cloud market, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google are giving tough competition to each other and to Amazon also for…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
30%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
18%
Computer Software Company
18%
University
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does OpenShift compare with Amazon AWS?
Open Shift makes managing infrastructure easy because of self-healing and automatic scaling. There is also a wonderful dashboard mechanism to alert us in case the application is over-committing or ...
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS?
How is SAP Cloud Platform different than Amazon AWS? Amazon AWS offers options both in terms of upgrading and expanding capabilities as well as acquiring greater storage space. These upgrades can ...
Looking to compare Google Firebase, Amazon AWS, and Microsoft Azure
We like Google Firebase hosting and authentication and also the excellent cloud functionality. Our team found the flexibility of handling and dealing with the database through EDL to be very useful...
What do you like most about Google Compute Engine?
Everything is simple and useful. The initial setup is not challenging.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Compute Engine?
Google resources are cheaper compared to AWS and Microsoft Azure. Among the three, Google is the cheapest option.
What needs improvement with Google Compute Engine?
Google has a lack of focus on their products. They have many products in various areas of the market, but they do not productize or appeal to the market effectively. They should concentrate on prod...
 

Also Known As

Amazon Web Services, AWS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq.
Allthecooks, BetterCloud, Bluecore, Cosentry, Evite, Ezakus, HTC, Infectious Media, iStreamPlanet, Mendelics, SageMathCloud, Sedex, Treeptik, Wibigoo, Wix, zulily, Zync
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon AWS vs. Google Compute Engine and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.