Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
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
KVM
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a virtualization solution developed by small Israeli software company Qumranet and supported by Red Hat since that company's acquisition in 2008.N/A
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
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)
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)KVM
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
9.1
18 Ratings
11% above category average
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime8.717 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.317 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.217 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates9.517 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools8.217 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images9.817 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support9.617 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls9.617 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation8.37 Ratings00 Ratings
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
-
Ratings
Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
9.2
5 Ratings
10% above category average
Virtual machine automated provisioning00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Management console00 Ratings9.03 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup00 Ratings9.73 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security00 Ratings9.53 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Small Businesses
Linode
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
Proxmox VE
Proxmox VE
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(65 ratings)
9.3
(5 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(12 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
I think nowadays, Amazon EC2 is best-suited for most app development and deployment use cases, especially if your resource requirements are not fixed over a long period of time. The flexibility provided by the on-demand pricing and rescaling option makes Amazon EC2 a great service, especially if your tech stack already runs on AWS. On the other hand, I think Amazon EC2 is not the best option if your tech infrastructure runs on another public cloud.
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Red Hat
KVM is the best solution in the case you need to test and turn up any virtual environment with limited vCPU/RAM resources. The obvious area of its use is a network environment when we want to avoid being tied to one type of hardware/vendor and being able to swap from one instance to another with no downtimes. The use of a vSwitch (that supports VLAN tagging) is a significant bonus for network engineers that some other hypervisors do not provide.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • A great variety of choices in Amazon Machine Image (AMI) types. Users can select a more basic type to run generic workloads, but also have the choice to pick an AMI pre-installed with specific services in the AWS Marketplace.
  • The range of instance types can support the usage from a student's exploration (inexpensive general-purpose nano instances) to an enterprise's most intense workloads (memory or storage-optimized instances with terabytes of memory and ultra-fast network connection).
  • The pricing options, from regular instances, reserved instances to spot instances allow users to get the job done and make smart choices about how much they want to pay and when they want to pay.
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Red Hat
  • KVM is really good at providing fast and reliable virtualization for Linux guests
  • Since KVM is a kernel module, every VM is a Linux process which can be managed by Linux system tools
  • KVM integrates very well with the management framework libvirt, which is why KVM can be integrated in automation tools as well
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • This service is a bit difficult to consume. New users need a big learning curve to use this service effectively.
  • UI for EC2 service is a little complex and at many places, it misses detailed explanation.
  • Sometimes it takes too long to create images of EC2 instances. This keeps your EC2 up for that extra time. When instances are heavy, it penalizes a lot of money.
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Red Hat
  • Complex networking
  • GPU processing is not fully supported
  • It's hard to set up without support tools
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Usability
Amazon AWS
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows various ways of gaining incidents, such as slow growth, money, and the reserved ones, mostly depend entirely on the necessity, because it makes highly intelligent choices possible at these times, which enable considerable cost savings whilst addressing the situation as best I like.
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Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
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.
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Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Azure VM and Google Compute Engine are alternatives to EC2. AWS EC2 is most matures and advanced of the 3. All these provide easy-to-deploy and automatically configured third-party applications, including single virtual machine or multiple virtual machine solutions.
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Red Hat
Kernel-based Virtual Machine is an open-source and free solution, compared to Virtualbox which is a product from Oracle.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • AWS has had a very positive return on investment for every client we have that uses it. They are saving money in the long run.
  • AWS includes the underlying operating system licenses with their EC2 instances so no longer do we have to navigate through Microsoft licensing headache.
  • EC2 allows us to easily create a golden image of servers and store them as AMIs. This makes spinning up new servers that need a particular set of software in the future extremely easy and cost-effective.
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Red Hat
  • KVM just works and gets out of the way
  • KVM is working great with other open-source technologies like QEMU and libvirt
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