Amid the pandemic, there has been an accelerated adoption of cloud services by enterprises. When choosing to utilize cloud services, most organizations tend to compare "cost" and "stability."
When searching for cloud service costs online, the most common findings are the advantages of pay-as-you-go models and long-term discount plans. This results in a wide variety of pricing models, making it confusing to gather information. Moreover, opinions about different providers' pricing vary, adding to the confusion.
AWS EC2, Azure VM, GCP GCE, Alibaba Cloud ECS—which provider offers the most cost-effective pricing? Which one is more stable? This guide compares the official data of these four cloud service providers.
Comparison of Pricing for Major Cloud Servers
Firstly, let's introduce the contenders, alphabetically:
- Alibaba Cloud (Elastic Compute Service, ECS)
- Amazon Web Services (Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2)
- Azure (Virtual Machines, VM)
- Google Cloud Platform (Google Compute Engine, GCE)
Next, let's define the comparison criteria:
- Machine specifications: Select the latest specifications from the General-purpose series
- Operating system: Linux
- Billing method: Pay as you go / On-demand
- Regions: Hong Kong and Singapore, as these are locations all four providers have established.
The following tables are directly compiled from the official websites of each provider:
Pricing in Hong Kong Region
| vCPU | Memory(GB) | Alibaba Cloud | AWS | Azure | GCP |
| g7 | m5 | Dsv5 | N2 | ||
| 2 | 8 | 0.119 | 0.132 | 0.132 | 0.135886 |
| 4 | 16 | 0.238 | 0.264 | 0.264 | 0.271772 |
| 8 | 32 | 0.475 | 0.528 | 0.528 | 0.543544 |
| 16 | 64 | 0.95 | 1.056 | 1.056 | 1.087088 |
| 32 | 128 | 1.901 | 2.112 | 2.112 | 2.174176 |
| 64 | 256 | 3.802 | 4.224 | 4.224 | 4.348352 |
From the table above, in terms of pricing, Alibaba Cloud offers the most competitive rates in the Hong Kong region, followed by Amazon and Microsoft, both with identical prices. Google Cloud's pricing in the Hong Kong region is relatively less competitive.
Pricing in Singapore Region
| vCPU | Memory(GB) | Alibaba Cloud | AWS | Azure | GCP |
| g7 | m6i | Dsv5 | N2 | ||
| 2 | 8 | 0.108 | 0.12 | 0.12 | 0.119806 |
| 4 | 16 | 0.216 | 0.24 | 0.24 | 0.239612 |
| 8 | 32 | 0.432 | 0.48 | 0.48 | 0.479224 |
| 16 | 64 | 0.864 | 0.96 | 0.96 | 0.958448 |
| 32 | 128 | 1.728 | 1.92 | 1.92 | 1.916896 |
| 64 | 256 | 3.456 | 3.84 | 3.84 | 3.833792 |
In terms of pricing, Alibaba Cloud also has a competitive edge in the Singapore region. However, Google Cloud's pricing in Singapore stands out. AWS and Azure still maintain identical pricing.
Comparison of Stability Among Major Cloud Providers
In addition to pricing, service stability is also crucial. While opinions on stability may vary, one relatively objective parameter to compare is SLA (Service Level Agreement).
What is SLA?
According to Wikipedia, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a formal commitment between a service provider and a customer. It defines specific service indicators—quality, availability, responsibility—reached by the service provider and service user.
In simpler terms in the cloud world, SLA ensures "uptime," referring to the degree of continuous uninterrupted service provided by cloud service providers. The higher the percentage, the better. Providers offer compensation if they fail to meet these commitments due to faults or other reasons.
The following table is compiled from the official websites of the providers:
Comparison Table of SLA Among Major Cloud Providers
| Alibaba Cloud | AWS | Azure | GCP | |
| Region | 99.995% | 99.99% | 99.99% | 99.99% |
| Instance | 99.975% | 99.5% | 99.5% | 99.5% |
From the table above, for server products, both in Region and Instance categories, Alibaba Cloud provides higher commitments.
Surprisingly, in the comparison of the two most crucial factors for cloud platform selection—"cost" and "stability"—Alibaba Cloud offers relatively advantageous conditions.
reference:
https://www.alibabacloud.com/tc/pricing-calculator#/commodity/vm_intl
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
https://azure.microsoft.com/zh-tw/pricing/details/virtual-machines/linux/
https://cloud.google.com/compute/vm-instance-pricing
https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/doc-detail/42436.htm
https://aws.amazon.com/tw/compute/sla/
https://azure.microsoft.com/zh-tw/support/legal/sla/virtual-machines/v1_9/
https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla