Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) vs. Google Compute Engine

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon S3
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Amazon S3 is a cloud-based object storage service from Amazon Web Services. It's key features are storage management and monitoring, access management and security, data querying, and data transfer.N/A
Google Compute Engine
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Google Compute Engine is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) product from Google Cloud. It provides virtual machines with carbon-neutral infrastructure which run on the same data centers that Google itself uses.
$0
per month GB
Pricing
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Google Compute Engine
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Preemptible Price - Predefined Memory
0.000892 / GB
Hour
Three-year commitment price - Predefined Memory
$0.001907 / GB
Hour
One-year commitment price - Predefined Memory
$0.002669 / GB
Hour
On-demand price - Predefined Memory
$0.004237 / GB
Hour
Preemptible Price - Predefined vCPUs
0.006655 / vCPU
Hour
Three-year commitment price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.014225 / CPU
Hour
One-year commitment price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.019915 / vCPU
Hour
On-demand price - Predefined vCPUS
$0.031611 / vCPU
Hour
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon S3Google Compute Engine
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsPrices vary according to region (i.e US central, east, & west time zones). Google Compute Engine also offers a discounted rate for a 1 & 3 year commitment.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Google Compute Engine
Considered Both Products
Amazon S3
Chose Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
In terms of AWS services, S3 is the best storage solution offered that gives us security and reliability with a wide, even if it is too wide at times, array of services making it a cost effective solution. However, when compared to other large cloud providers, such as Google & …
Google Compute Engine

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Google Compute Engine
Data Center Backup
Comparison of Data Center Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
9.7
2 Ratings
13% above category average
Google Compute Engine
-
Ratings
Universal recovery9.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Instant recovery9.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Recovery verification10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Multiple backup destinations10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Backup to the cloud10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Snapshots10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Flexible deployment10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Management dashboard7.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform support10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Retention options10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Encryption10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Enterprise Backup
Comparison of Enterprise Backup features of Product A and Product B
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
9.5
2 Ratings
16% above category average
Google Compute Engine
-
Ratings
Continuous data protection10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Replication10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Operational reporting and analytics8.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-location capabilities10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
-
Ratings
Google Compute Engine
6.8
46 Ratings
18% below category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings8.126 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings8.343 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings7.939 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings5.844 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings3.027 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings6.245 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings7.246 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings7.346 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings7.92 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Google Compute Engine
Small Businesses
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Score 9.7 out of 10
Akamai Cloud Computing
Akamai Cloud Computing
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.7 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.7 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Google Compute Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(68 ratings)
7.6
(46 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.1
(10 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(8 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.3
(8 ratings)
Support Rating
9.8
(21 ratings)
8.4
(10 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)Google Compute Engine
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
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.
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Google
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.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
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Google
  • 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
Amazon AWS
  • 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
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Google
  • 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
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Google
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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Usability
Amazon AWS
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.
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Google
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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Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Google
There were some very few cases where we had an outage but mostly it did not last more than 10 minutes. And if there were any maintenance, we were notified beforehand. So did not have any major problem with Google Compute Engine's availability.
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Performance
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Google
GCE is a performant infrastructure. The GCE usage reports are readily available and the reports load time is insignificant. GCE exposes various REST API which allows the third part system to integrate with GCE. Many observability software like newRelic integrates with the GCE to offer monitoring of GCE
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
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.
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Google
  • 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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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
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.
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Google
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.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
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Google
  • 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

Screenshot of How to choose the right VM
With thousands of applications, each with different requirements, which VM is right for you?Screenshot of documentation, guides, and reference architectures
Migration Center is Google Cloud's unified migration platform with features like cloud spend estimation, asset discovery, and a variety of tooling for different migration scenarios.