Amazon S3 vs Google Compute Engine

Amazon S3

S3 is excellent for storing and serving static, media, and uploaded files. Keep your JS, CSS, and images there, as well as user-uploaded images and documents and app-generated documents, and then serve them through configuration in your scalable applications. Elastic Beanstalk and Lambda play very well with S3. If you grow to especially large scale, start managing the regions of your S3 buckets for optimal cloud service.

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Corwin Cole

CTO & COO

ApruvdFinancial Services, 1-10 employees

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Google Compute Engine

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

9.3

Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime

—

9.7

Dynamic scaling

—

9.2

Elastic load balancing

—

9.5

Pre-configured templates

—

9.6

Monitoring tools

—

8.4

Pre-defined machine images

—

9.6

Operating system support

—

9.4

Security controls

—

9.0

Pros

Automatically stores previous versions of applications deployed to Elastic Beanstalk, to preserve rollbacks.
Integrates with Python applications using the boto library.
Serves static and media files quickly and reliably.

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Corwin Cole

CTO & COO

ApruvdFinancial Services, 1-10 employees

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Per-hour pricing with sustained use discounts -- you'll get a good discount if you run a VM for a long time.
Always free usage limits -- you can run a small VM on it completely free of charge!
Preemptible VM – huge discounts when you only want to run it for a short time, but it could be terminated if there's a demand.
GPU support -- useful if you want to control your ML training jobs by yourself instead of using their Cloud ML APIs.

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Dmitry Sadovnychyi

Software Engineer

LawInsider.comLegal Services, 1-10 employees

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Cons

The documentation about caching, CORS protection, and permissions in general could be easier to comprehend. For experts on cloud architecture, I'm sure it's fine, but as a novice, it was very difficult to wrap my head around.
Could come with some Amazon-vetted JavaScript, especially a framework like jQuery, Angular, etc. Having to upload my own copies of frameworks like jQuery into S3 so that I'm not dependent on an external CDN is a little redundant.
I'm not sure if it already comes with virus protection or if that would even make sense, but if not, that could be a feature. Really I have almost no complaints.

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Corwin Cole

CTO & COO

ApruvdFinancial 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

No score

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Google Compute Engine9.0

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 Engine9.0

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

S3 is still being used within our org but we have dialed it back heavily due to the inexpensive competing product CloudFlare offers. CloudFlare is basically free for the same functionality and the company has matured to the point where it is reliable and scalable, plus CDN distribution is their bread and butter on top of that. If we were starting over today I'd start with CloudFlare.

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Matthew Gardner

Co-Founder

RouteThisComputer Software, 11-50 employees

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AWS has a ton of options in terms of tools that you can use. It's pricing model is hit or miss (some offerings are simply unaffordable). Some of the API design is questionable at best and frustrating at worst. Microsoft Azure is a newcomer in the market with focus on enterprise customers. The prior focus on the Microsoft stack (which they've moved away from) has been a huge negative, and something they've had to overcome by layering other tools on top of their system and offering cut rate pricing.

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