Google Kubernetes Engine vs. Microsoft Azure vs. Vultr

If your application is complex, if it's planet-scale, or if you need autoscaling, then Kubernetes is best suited. If your application is straightforward, you can opt for App Engine or Cloud Run. In many cases, you can prefer to run the cloud on GKE. But once you deploy on Kubernetes, you get the flexibility to try different things. But if you don't seek flexibility, it's not an option for you.

Incentivized

Azure is particularly well suited for enterprise environments with existing Microsoft investments, those that require robust compliance features, and organizations that need hybrid cloud capabilities that bridge on-premises and cloud infrastructure. In my opinion, Azure is less appropriate for cost-sensitive startups or small businesses without dedicated cloud expertise and scenarios requiring edge computing use cases with limited connectivity. Azure offers comprehensive solutions for most business needs but can feel like there is a higher learning curve than other cloud-based providers, depending on the product and use case.

I've been with Vultr over 5 years hosting multiple businesses and email related services. I never experienced a significant outage or data loss. Migration has always been successful as well. Support is top tier and IP reputation is clean. I like the choices of OS, ease of platform use and multiple hosting/ region options.

Incentivized

• Engine upgrade rollout strategy - well documented and configurable
• Integration with other Google Cloud services like the Compute Engine, SaaS databases, and some cloud networking like Cloud Armor
• Graphical interface for a lot of operations - either for a quick peek/overview or actual work done by administrators and/or developers (via the Google Cloud Console, for example)

Incentivized

• Microsoft Azure is highly scalable and flexible. You can quickly scale up or down additional resources and computing power.
• You have no longer upfront investments for hardware. You only pay for the use of your computing power, storage space, or services.
• The uptime that can be achieved and guaranteed is very important for our company. This includes the rapid maintenance for security updates that are mostly carried out by Microsoft.
• The wide range of capabilities of services that are possible in Microsoft Azure. You can practically put or create anything in Microsoft Azure.

Incentivized

• Good performance from servers close to me and my customers
• Ease of spinning up new servers
• Great service levels of servers I spin up
• Notifications of issues or downtime come through quickly, allowing me to handle client queries with knowledge in hand.

• Support of IPv6.
• Better GitOps.
• A "serverless" Kubernetes so we can install Google config connector will be really awesome.
• Container-native load balancers do not support internal TCP/UDP load balancers or network load balancers.

Incentivized

• The cost of resources is difficult to determine, technical documentation is frequently out of date, and documentation and mapping capabilities are lacking.
• The documentation needs to be improved, and some advanced configuration options require research and experimentation.
• Microsoft's licensing scheme is too complex for the average user, and Azure SQL syntax is too different from traditional SQL.

• The response times for support tickets is too high and a quicker response time would be appreciated
• Availability of the VPS solution in Middle east and Africa would help
• Abilito to connect SIP trunks would make it more easy to run active communictaion platforms on Vultr

Incentivized

Moving to Azure was and still is an organizational strategy and not simply changing vendors. Our product roadmap revolved around Azure as we are in the business of humanitarian relief and Azure and Microsoft play an important part in quickly and efficiently serving all of the world. Migration and investment in Azure should be considered as an overall strategy of an organization and communicated companywide.

Just a great product with no bells and whistles, which is the advantage. We spend very little time learning and using Vultr and more time using the systems we have in Vultr to complete our tasks. Not having to worry about the IT overhead is huge and saves a great deal of time

Incentivized

• Google Kubernetes Engine has a good UI and documentation that facilitates setup and helps get projects moving along quickly
• Its built-in logging integrations with StackDriver make it easier to monitor the application and log issues quickly
• Automated orchestration, deployment, and scaling of nodes and networking are all easily configurable with yaml files

Incentivized

As Microsoft Azure is [doing a] really good with PaaS. The need of a market is to have [a] combo of PaaS and IaaS. While AWS is making [an] exceptionally well blend of both of them, Azure needs to work more on DevOps and Automation stuff. Apart from that, I would recommend Azure as a great platform for cloud services as scale.

Incentivized

easy to use and configure. great bang for the buck. I need an affordable solution to host in the cloud data from systems installed at our client's site with the ability to drill down and change the configuration remotely. Vultr enabled us to do that in an efficient and affordable way.

Incentivized

It has proven to be unreliable in our production environment and services become unavailable without proper notification to system administrators

Incentivized

Very good Kubernetes distribution with a reasonable total price. Integration with storage and load balancer for ingress and services speed up every process deployment.

Incentivized

We were running Windows Server and Active Directory, so [Microsoft] Azure was a seamless transition. We ran into a few, if any support issues, however, the availability of Microsoft Azure's support team was more than willing and able to guide us through the process. They even proposed solutions to issues we had not even thought of!

Incentivized

Vultr makes it easy to contact technical support. The techs are very competent. In a number of occasions they have bounced the responsibility back to me when they could have saved us all time and heartache by simply implementing the solution directly

Incentivized

As I have mentioned before the issue with my Oracle Mismatch Version issues that have put a delay on moving one of my platforms will justify my 7 rating.

Vultr implementation seemed based on open-source tools and basic cloud principles - some things were more complicated to do compared with more developed cloud providers, but on the other hand it was more extensible by open-source tools.

Incentivized

GKE spins up new nodes a LOT faster than AKS. GKE's auto scaler runs a lot smoother than AKS. GKE has a lot more Kubernetes features baked in natively.

Incentivized

As I continue to evaluate the "big three" cloud providers for our clients, I make the following distinctions, though this gap continues to close. AWS is more granular, and inherently powerful in the configuration options compared to [Microsoft] Azure. It is a "developer" platform for cloud. However, Azure PowerShell is helping close this gap. Google Cloud is the leading containerization platform, largely thanks to it building kubernetes from the ground up. Azure containerization is getting better at having the same storage/deployment options.

Incentivized

Linode is a more old-school offering. Linode pricing model and infrastructure rely on classic Virtual Machines. What we like about Vultr is that they offer the same at the front, but in the back, the machines are much more flexible and can be tailor-made to our needs, which of course also impacts the costs of running the infrastructure.

Incentivized

Pricing is fair and did not increase

Incentivized

• When issues came up, we reached out to some folks at GCP and they seemed to be very prompt and attentive to our needs. They were always willing to help and provide additional details or recommendations or links to resources. This kind of support is very helpful as it allows us to navigate GKE with more confidence.

Incentivized

• Reduced cloud computing costs.
• Easier management of applications.
• Extra time investment to learn how to setup applications in Google versus Amazon.

Incentivized

• For about 2 years we didn't have to do anything with our production VMs, the system ran without a hitch, which meant our engineers could focus on features rather than infrastructure.
• DNS management was very easy in Azure, which made it easy to upgrade our cluster with zero downtime.
• Azure Web UI was easy to work with and navigate, which meant our senior engineers and DevOps team could work with Azure without formal training.

Incentivized

• We have experienced a 200% return on using Vultr products with a 100% Customer Satisfaction rating.
• Vultr gives us the regions to deploy where our small business customers are located.
• Vultr has helped us scale up our company and our cloud solutions.

Incentivized