Likelihood to Recommend Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
Read full review Google Compute Engine is so easy to implement and run. It doesn't require much knowledge to build an app since they provide multiple options to choose from with their prebuilt sample list. We can easily make customization on any website app we built for our client according to their needs and make changes if required.
Read full review Pros Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities. Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions. It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world. Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS. Read full review Scaling - whether it's traffic spikes or just steady growth, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling makes sure we've got the compute power we need without any manual juggling acts Load balancing - Keeping things smooth with that load balancing across multiple VMs, so our users don't have to deal with slow load times or downtime even when things get crazy busy Customizability - Mix and match configs for CPU, RAM, storage and whatnot to suit our specific app needs Read full review Cons Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are Read full review Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides. Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount. Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Overall services are good to go. Received good feedback from users. Have regional server locations. It has free extra service included.
Read full review Usability It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.
Read full review Having interacted with several cloud services, GCE stands out to me as more usable than most. The naming and locating of features is a little more intuitive than most I've interacted with, and hinting is also quite helpful. Getting staff up to speed has proven to be overall less painful than others.
Brendon Brown Business IT, Web Development, eCommerce and Digital Marketing
Read full review Reliability and Availability The Google Compute Engine is constantly up, healthy, and available. I have never experienced any issues with it loading or functioning.Since it is accessible everywhere in the world, it is always available with low latency for all regions.However, I have occasionally seen problems with various NoSQL databases' availability, such as MongoDB, in terms of speed.Overall though, it's always accessible.
Read full review Performance Google Compute Engine's performance is up to the standard and I don't really have any complain about that. But website itself does not load quickly and there is a very noticeable delay when the website loads. And no, our system did not our slow down when we integrated Google Compute Engine in our system.
Read full review Support Rating AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.
Read full review The documentation needs to be better for intermediate users - There are first steps that one can easily follow, but after that, the documentation is often spotty or not in a form where one can follow the steps and accomplish the task. Also, the documentation and the product often go out of sync, where the commands from the documentation do not work with the current version of the product. Google support was great and their presence on site was very helpful in dealing with various issues. Read full review Alternatives Considered Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features
Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup,
Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.
Read full review Google Compute Engine provides a one stop solution for all the complex features and the UI is better than Amazon's EC2 and
Azure Machine Learning for ease of usability. It's always good to have an eco-system of products from Google as it's one of the most used search engine and IoT services provider, which helps with ease of integration and updates in the future.
Read full review Return on Investment It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost. The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in. If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents. Read full review With Google Compute we don't have the overhead of managing our own data centers reducing costs and reducing the staff needed to manage systems. As I said earlier, Google's costs are ~1/2 of AWS, so we are able to see a ROI much faster. Read full review ScreenShots Google Compute Engine Screenshots