Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Users can launch instances with a variety of OSs, load them with custom application environments, manage network access permissions, and run images on multiple systems.
$0.01
per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
Azure Virtual Machines
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Virtual Machines (VMs) are available on Microsoft Azure, providing what is built as a low-cost, per-second compute service, available via Windows or Linux.
$0
Per Hour
IBM Cloud Object Storage
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cloud Object Storage is an IBM Cloud product in the endpoint backup and IaaS categories. It is commonly used for data archiving and backup, for web and mobile applications, and as scalable, persistent storage for analytics.
$0
per month
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Azure Virtual Machines
IBM Cloud Object Storage
Editions & Modules
Data Transfer
$0.00 - $0.09
per GB
On-Demand
$0.0042 - $6.528
per Hour
EBS-Optimized Instances
$0.005
per IP address with a running instance per hour on a pro rata basis
Carrier IP Addresses
$0.005 - $0.10
T4g Instances
$0.04
per vCPU-Hour Linux, RHEL, & SLES
T2, T3 Instances
$0.05 ($0.096)
per vCPU-Hour Linux, RHEL, & SLES (Windows)
3 Year Reserved - Burstable VMs - B1S
$0.0038
Per Hour
Spot - General Purpose - Av2
$0.005
Per Hour
1 Year Reserved - Burstable VMs - B1S
$0.0059
Per Hour
Pay as You Go - Burstable VMs - B1S
$0.0075
Per Hour
Spot - Compute Optimized - Fsv2
$0.0104
Per Hour
Spot - General Purpose - Dv3
$0.0125
Per Hour
Spot - Memory Optimized - Ev3
$0.016
Per Hour
3 Year Reserved - Compute Optimized - Fsv2
$0.0307
Per Hour
3 Year Reserved - General Purpose - Dv3
$0.0369
Per Hour
3 Year Reserved - Memory Optimized - Ev3
$0.0481
Per Hour
1 Year Reserved - Compute Optimized - Fsv2
$0.05
Per Hour
1 Year Reserved - General Purpose - Dv3
$0.0548
Per Hour
1 Year Reserved - Memory Optimized - Ev3
$0.0753
Per Hour
Pay as You Go - Compute Optimized - Fsv2
$0.0846
Per Hour
Pay as You Go - General Purpose - Dv3
$0.096
Per Hour
Pay as You Go - Memory Optimized - Ev3
$0.126
Per Hour
One-Rate Plan
As low as USD $12/TB a month
per month
Standard Plan
Free up to 5GB—no minimum fee, pay only for what you use
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Azure Virtual Machines
IBM Cloud Object Storage
Free Trial
No
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
—
The One-Rate and Standard service plans for Cloud Object Storage include resiliency options, flexible data classes and built-in security. Pricing is based on the choice of location, storage class and resiliency choice.
Amazon was the first one in the market to provide virtual machines in the cloud and certainly gained a lot of popularity before the rest even came to the picture. The different service providers are quite mutually exclusive, and one cannot easily use more than one at the same …
We have been using EC2 for so much longer, that even though we use Azure's other features and services more then the equivalent AWS features and services, we don't usually go for Azure's VM offerings first over EC2. I guess that that means this recommendation is mostly based …
Actually, Azure Virtual Machines have very good and user friendly UI and options are well stacked compared to AWS. All are good for scaling also considering the backup and restore process, it's very easy and smooth.
Azure VM's are far way cost effective than the AWS EC2 service also Azure VM's provides up Smart Hybrid Cloud integration with the Existing on Prem architecture. One of the key feature of Azure VM are they provide High availability and data redundant zones for the VM to be hosted.
We use both Azure and AWS VM services currently. AWS' EC2s have been around for longer an offer a much more reliable Linux OS support. But the gap getting smaller by the day, and Azure VMs are catching up nicely. In our case, we use a lot AWS for Linux-based applications …
I have tested AWS EC2 instances, however, we chose
Azure Virtual Machines as we use SCOM as an enterprise monitoring solution and it goes very well
with Azure as monitoring. We have a lot of customers on Azure and monitoring the Azure environment with SCOM is easy through
More or less these are comparable offerings in my opinion as a user of both the AWS and Azure Clouds in a business environment in which there's a use case for a multi-cloud environment. We were able to complete a feature parody between the Azure Cloud and AWS Cloud for key …
Azure has a better interface than its competitors like Amazon and IBM. It is more intuitive and easier to use. It also has more features like connection troubleshooting, boot diagnostics, and running remote commands.
Amazon S3 service is also a good option, but based on features it provides compared with IBM Cloud Object Storage, it is less suitable. IBM Cloud Object Storage [is] also integrated with more services, like IBM Cloud SQL and IBM Aspera, which AWS does not provide to transfer …
Well for my self, the IBM Cloud Object Storage is required for the Coursera course and fee to use without credit card information, therefore, it is a no brainer for me to use as an individual. The IBM Cloud Object Storage has all cloud computing services that the major …
Above listed do not provide free trial at all. IBM provided me with free lite plan so we can try it first for free. And I think this is the best thing about IBM.
Suitable for companies that are looking for performance at a competitive price, flexibility to switch instance type even with RI, flexibility to add-on IOPS, option to lower running cost with the regular introduction of new instance type that comes with higher performance but at a lower cost.
If you want to host a dedicated Windows server on the cloud, and especially if you want to integrate it with your on premises Active Directory, Azure Virtual Machines should be your first choice. Obviously running Linux on Azure works very well too, but given Azure's pricing is not the cheapest, there are other providers out there that have a better cost-benefit ratio for Linux. That said, hosting Windows on Azure can be affordable (especially when compared to other providers) if you plan your licensing, topology, and application architecture correctly.
In my experience, IBM Cloud Object Storage is well suited for projects like the one I am working on. This includes the use of natural language classification and the uploading of data to train a machine learning model for tag suggestions based on a body of text. Using IBM Cloud Object Storage has helped with this greatly. IBM Cloud Object Storage has also been great for Big Data Analytics thanks to its scalablilty and ease of use for large datasets. Alongside IBM Watson and our team's internal big data tools we've managed to process and analyze data more efficiently, leading to key insights that have driven business value for our clients.
When demand is high, we scale the service out, eg During a Football Match.
When a football match is over and the throughput of data from OPTA drops we save by the service scaling back in.
Our App Service Plans along with the Clean C# code are lightening fast giving a good customer experience.
When producing the TV Guide information and a program overruns its scheduled time, a client can instantly be updated to the new programming schedule as our change is instant and its in the right place for all the clients to download and adjust their television guides appropriately to send out to the public giving a 24x7 uptime service that is precise and accurate and resilient to outages due to failover zones around the world.
IBM Cloud Object Storage is an excellent choice for disaster recovery and backup solutions. Its high durability and geographic redundancy ensure that our backup data is safe and can be quickly restored in case of a disaster. This capability is crucial for maintaining our business continuity and minimizing downtime. We have deployed our loads in an IKS cluster distributed in 3 different AZs with stateful data allocated in COS.
We have a video streaming application and need to store and deliver a vast library of video content to millions of users worldwide, so we store our data in COS, which is cheap and reliable.
We have a bunch of data that must be analyzed and stored in datasets for fraud detection, risk management, and customer insights. In these cases, this data is moved from Onprem to IBM Cloud so we can use cheap storage like COS.
The choices on AMIs, instance types and additional configuration can be overwhelming for any non-DevOps person.
The pricing information should be more clear (than only providing the hourly cost) when launching the instance. AWS DynamoDB gives an estimated monthly cost when creating tables, and I would love to see similar cost estimation showing on EC2 instances individually, as not all developers gets access to the actual bills.
The term for reserving instances are at least 12 months. With instance types changing so fast and better instances coming out every other day, it's really hard to commit to an existing instance type for 1 or more years at a time.
Pricing can be a concern if you are truly agnostic to which cloud you are building your particular solution in.
The UI, as is the case with any cloud provider, is crowded.
As with any cloud provider, it can be difficult to tune in exactly the right amount of servers for your needs...you might find yourself under/overprovisioning.
Searching and retrieving—full-text search or metadata search—is one of the significant areas of improvement. It isn't easy to search for data with this.
Integration with other IBM cloud services is trickier. For example, integrating this with API Connect to access the data from API will be difficult for users.
Support - I think you should have more support community.
You an start using EC2 instances immediately, is so easy and intuitive to start using them, EC2 has wizard to create the EC2 instances in the web browser or if you are code savvy you can create them with simple line in the CLI or using an SDK. Once you are comfortable using EC2, you can even automate the process.
No VM console, weak management interface, changing CPU/memory is not straightforward. On the positive side, basic RDP functionality is good to have. As long as things are working, the ability to host Windows VMs is appreciated.
For my use cases, it has been a very smooth experience. Even my new colleagues have been able to get on top of things very quickly. This shows how easy it is to work with
We rarely face downtime or access issues with IBM Cloud Object Storage. It’s mostly available when we need it, even during peak hours or heavy data loads.
I would give it a 9 because it works smooth with our AI and analytics tools, no major slowdown. Pages and dashboards load fine most of the time, and reports finish in decent time even when data is heavy.
AWS's support is good overall. Not outstanding, but better than average. We have had very little reason to engage with AWS support but in our limited experience, the staff has been knowledgeable, timely and helpful. The only negative is actually initiating a service request can be a bit of a pain.
I give the overall support for Azure Virtual Machines a 7 because I think while the overall support do a great job there are still areas that it could improve on such as efficiency and speed. So while I only give it a 7 and it has some issues it is still better than the overall support at Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.
I have been working in IT sector for more than 15 years. I have worked with various vendors. IBM's sales team, support team have been really helpful. After we start to use their product, their UX design team also contacted us to get feedback from us. They are really interested about our experience.
I just researching and applying the tools on their platforms to ensure a good learning path, based on my needs. Reading the documentation related with resources, tools. Is too big, but I am trying to know more about it every day. It is a good way to know more about their resources. A new way to attract new customers. At the end of the day, we are all involved in improvement and automation of our tasks and resources for customers and end-users.
Yes Our organization used IBM professional services to implement IBM object storage because of its data consistency and multiple way to upload and download data and its encryption security features. Also that its brand matter for the any organization to secure the layer and storage. It sis also verify that application and system are compatibale for this product
Amazon EC2 is super flexible compared to the PaaS offerings like Heroku Platform and Google App Engine since with Amazon EC2, we have access to the terminal. In terms of pricing, it's basically just the same as Google Compute Engine. The deciding factor is Amazon EC2's native integration with other AWS services since they're all in the same cloud platform.
Azure Virtual Machines offer unparalleled flexibility in provisioning, managing and upgrading the VM instances, both manually and programmatically. AVM offer very granular billing options and enables high costs optimisations (while still being costly). The other competitors I mentioned are very good at offering dead-cheap VMs. But if you need anything beyond that, especially for big computing, you need Azure Virtual Machines.
Amazon S3 is a great service to safely back up your data where redundancy is guaranteed, and the cost is fair. In the past I have used 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. Amazon S3 service is a good option, but based on the features it provides compared with IBM Cloud Object Storage, it is less suitable. IBM Cloud Object Storage is also integrated with more services, like IBM Cloud SQL and IBM Aspera, which AWS does not provide to transfer files at maximum speed in the world.
Scaling up the number of users can lead to significant increases in licensing costs, which, while not a technical limitation, can be a practical constraint for some organizations
It reduced the need for heavy on-premises instances. Also, it completely eliminates maintenance of the machine. Their SLA criteria are also matching business needs. Overall IAAS is the best option when information is not so crucial to post on the cloud.
It makes both horizontal and vertical scaling really easy. This keeps your infrastructure up and running even while you are increasing the capacity or facing more traffic. This leads to having better customer satisfaction.
If you do not choose your instance type suitable for your business, it may incur lots of extra costs.
It's so easy to spin up new instances, that it becomes also to easy to have to many of them to manage. Many teams end up with a couple of hundreds of VMs after a short while, making the whole thing very hard to maneuver
Azure VMs are the next step for us to rely on Onprem servers, and leaving the management of the infrastructure to the professionals
The ease of use, is also important when our main focus is to deliver new applications and integrations fast, and not having to worry about infrastructure. We sell bottles, not CPUs
This allows us to recommend a platform to our clients that will quickly help them create new, efficient business processes with very little development.
This saves clients hours and days of manual analysis of images, allowing the system to do the work when attaching Object Storage to models.
There is a learning curve in utilizing the storage and the modeling, but once up and running, it works well during deployment.
