Amazon Lightsail vs Google Compute Engine

Likelihood to Recommend

1. It's highly recommended for users who are looking to build their own VPN service2. Amazon Lightsail provides plenty of outgoing data for any use case (e.g., a $3.50 plan provides 500GB of outgoing data)3. Can be used to deploy containerized applications that require scaling4. Plans ranging from $3.50 to $160 a month, which is awesome

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Sandesh Singh

FrontEnd Development Engineer

Genius Systems Pvt. LtdInternet, 201-500 employees

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I have recommended the platform to students, friends and family members alike. The help and documentation is very easy to follow for a beginner. Plus, GCP has built in tools which make some common tasks that non-production level cloud users need to accomplish very easy in an automated way. Now, to address the question of recommending GCE to a colleague, ultimately the organization will have to make a decision regarding the entire cloud platform. It wouldn't make much sense, outside of a special case, to use GCE for some parts of your cloud infrastructure and a competitor on other parts. That practical caveat aside, I believe that the GCP brings a strong suite of tools to the table overall and is good value for money at this time as well. Developer familiarity to certain competing platforms can be a sticking point, but a colleague who is already asking for a recommendation is likely already open minded about moving to GCP.

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Frank Palladino

Data Scientist

CrocusOil & Energy, 11-50 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon Lightsail

Google Compute Engine

Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime

Dynamic scaling

Elastic load balancing

Pre-configured templates

Monitoring tools

Pre-defined machine images

Operating system support

Security controls

Pros

Value instances packages
Better organized UI
Easy billing resulting in higher efficiency
Cheaper than competition
Better support staff
Can adjust for any bills you may have incurred by accident

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Sandesh Singh

FrontEnd Development Engineer

Genius Systems Pvt. LtdInternet, 201-500 employees

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A simple web-based interface that is a breeze to train new engineers to use. Our experienced engineers never have trouble finding or doing anything on GCE.
Sustained use and Committed use discounts mean we get top-tier VMs for an incredibly competitive price.
Wonderful identity and access management that gives us peace-of-mind when granting access to machines to contractors and other 3rd parties.
Fast VMs, lastest in hardware, and enough RAM to power even the hungriest of our services.

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Tyler Johnson

Senior Software Architect

Beneath The InkComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Cons

Very little documentation
Fewer support options in Amazon Lightsail
They only allow one adjustment and force you to terminate the instance that caused the issue before adjusting
Be aware of your usage in AWS
Always check for any extra unwanted bills

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Sandesh Singh

FrontEnd Development Engineer

Genius Systems Pvt. LtdInternet, 201-500 employees

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The L7 load balancer can be difficult to get set up. It's limited in its functionality, especially with the container engine.
It's hard to find certain objects on the web console. Often times the things I need to get to are buried in advanced menus.
Google's decision to only support MySQL on their relational DB service means that I have to manage Postgres instances in Compute on my own, managing everything from storage to backups.

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David Long, SPA

Director of Development

Cage DataComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Google Compute Engine 9.0

Based on 1 answer

Overall services are good to go. Received good feedback from users. Have regional server locations. It has free extra service included.

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Sazzad Hossain Sharkar

Chief Operating Officer (C.O.O.)

Akhaura Info FoundationEducation Management, 11-50 employees

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Usability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Google Compute Engine 9.1

Based on 9 answers

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.

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Brendon Brown

Business IT, Web Development, eCommerce and Digital Marketing

Island City MediaRetail, 11-50 employees

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Support Rating

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Google Compute Engine 8.8

Based on 11 answers

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.

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Verified User

Director in Information Technology

Internet Company, 10,001+ employees

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Alternatives Considered

Amazon Lightsail is a great platform. Before we started using it, we were using AWS EC2 instances as our primary servers after being dissatisfied with other providers. After Amazon Lightsail's introduction, we were able to reduce our operating costs, improve our quality assurance tasks, and provide much more efficient and better apps with our microservices architecture.

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Sandesh Singh

FrontEnd Development Engineer

Genius Systems Pvt. LtdInternet, 201-500 employees

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App Engine is somewhat similar, but we use it together with Compute Engine. App Engine is good for serving end requests to users -- it can scale automatically to any number of requests, but has it's own limitations. Compute Engine does not have any limitations. but you have to manage it by yourself and scale it manually as needed. I tried using Amazon's EC2 before the Compute Engine was released, but at that time their UI wasn't friendly, in the end Compute Engine provider much better integration with App Engine since their VMs can be really close to each other to reduce network delay. Google Cloud's UI is really good, you don't always want to manage your stuff using API.

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Dmitry Sadovnychyi

Software Engineer

LawInsider.comLegal Services, 1-10 employees

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Return on Investment

Highly efficient for our microservices architecture
Price to performance
Scalability
Adjustments for unwanted bills or charges
Wide selection of services entice you to use Amazon Lightsail
Able to deploy web apps to a full infrastructure.

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Sandesh Singh

FrontEnd Development Engineer

Genius Systems Pvt. LtdInternet, 201-500 employees

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Positive impact on the OpEx with reduction in CapEx resulting from reducing the time to move a workload from on-prem to the cloud
Incased RoI by reducing need for on-prem compute
Improved agility by providing the option to take on new AI workloads for test and dev without the need for upfront investment in

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Aditya Mohan

Manager

Skive itAirlines/Aviation, 51-200 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Amazon Lightsail Editions & Modules

Edition

512 MB Linux	$3.50¹
1 GB Linux	$5.00¹
2 GB Linux	$10.00¹

Per Month

Additional Pricing Details

—

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Google Compute Engine Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—

Rating Summary

Amazon Lightsail

Google Compute Engine

Amazon Lightsail

Google Compute Engine

Amazon Lightsail

Google Compute Engine

Amazon Lightsail

Google Compute Engine