Amazon S3 vs Google Compute Engine

Likelihood to Recommend

Anytime – and I do mean anytime – you have files of any size over, say, 50kb and they are static you should reach for S3 first. In 7 years of using the service, I have never once lost a file. There have been a total of maybe 30 minutes of downtime in 7 years, which was a DNS level issue. The speed is excellent, the availability is incredible, and there simply is no good competitor for the price.

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Justin Schroeder

Partner & Senior Engineer

Braid, LLCMarketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees

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We are a web software company and GCE has been great for hosting our web applications. We have a single-node and multi-node instances and GCE never misses a beat. We also have some Windows Server clients, so launching and testing our software in Windows is made possible by GCE. When comes to reliably hosting web infrastructure at scale, GCE is a fantastic choice.

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Tyler Johnson

Senior Software Architect

Beneath The InkComputer Software, 1-10 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon S3

—

Google Compute Engine

8.8

Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime

—

9.6

Dynamic scaling

—

9.2

Elastic load balancing

—

9.5

Pre-configured templates

—

8.8

Monitoring tools

—

7.8

Pre-defined machine images

—

8.7

Operating system support

—

7.9

Security controls

—

8.6

Pros

Nearly every web framework now has integrations with the service as an easy plug-and-play storage solution.
General integration is so good there are tons of third-party tools like Transmit (for mac) you can mount S3 as a remote disk for easy access, and even Amazon's own web portal for using S3 has gotten quite good.
It's incredibly easy to offload all the expensive bandwidth operations for your typical website or app to S3, and, assuming your services are not yet HTTP2, you even get the benefits of sharding.

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Justin Schroeder

Partner & Senior Engineer

Braid, LLCMarketing and Advertising, 11-50 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

While S3 has a huge list of available services, the services themselves tend to be lacking, such as the web server capability being able to only host static HTML content.
The additional capabilities have gotten a bit "out of hand" in terms of the amount of services available, which seemingly follow no particular grouping, which can make venturing beyond basic S3 storage services a daunting, and confusing endeavor.
Not having any storage "packages" for serving data is a big negative, as we would feel more comfortable with a set package, and a known monthly cost, rather than a fluctuating service billed by time x data.

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Craig Nash

Sr. Network Engineer

GodAmongGeeks.ComInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

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Sustained use discounts could be combined with committed use discounts -- just give me cheaper price if I'm running a VM for a year

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Dmitry Sadovnychyi

Software Engineer

LawInsider.comLegal Services, 1-10 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

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Ask the community to sound off

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

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Google Compute Engine 9.0

Based on 1 answer

Interface design is good. Have the most up-to-date applications. Third party integration is available. Have the authority to modify it myself.

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Sazzad Hossain Sharkar

Chief Operating Officer (C.O.O.)

Akhaura Info FoundationEducation Management, 11-50 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Prior to using S3, we were hosting all of our assets from the assets pipeline in our Ruby on Rails application. For a small company, this approach was fine but as the assets doubled and tripled, this was no longer the way to go. S3 will help you scale regardless of company size. It is especially key when you have multiple products that hold a variety of assets - images and videos.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Transportation/Trucking/Railroad Company, 11-50 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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