Cloud Pricing Comparison 2022 ｜AWS & Azure

Abstract: The decision between AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle can be difficult if you're thinking of switching to the public cloud or optimizing the option for your upcoming project. All of them provide flexible compute, storage, and networking along with the cloud-based features that engineers adore, such as self-service, quick provisioning, and autoscaling. What distinguishing qualities do AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform each have in the current cloud landscape?

AWS

Because of the range and depth of services offered by AWS, businesses opt to build their apps there. AWS is the ideal choice for many teams thanks to its wide range of capabilities, which include databases, analytics, management, IoT, security, and corporate apps. It makes sense that AWS has the largest share of the cloud computing market.

Azure

Azure now has a little higher enterprise adoption rate than AWS (80% Azure vs. 77% AWS)

Azure also provides a range of services for businesses, and because of Microsoft's established rapport with this market, several clients find it simple to choose Azure. Organizations may supply employees with business software while also utilizing cloud computing thanks to Azure, Office 365, and Microsoft Teams.

A comparison of discounted pricing for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

If a company commits to using their cloud services for one or more years, all cloud service providers give it discounts on on-demand instances. It is referred to as "Commitment Price" in Google Cloud, "Reserved Savings" in Azure, and "Reserved Instances" (RI) in AWS. These discounts encourage companies to commit to a predetermined level of consumption for a predetermined amount of time in exchange for a cheaper hourly cost on some (but not all) instances and virtual machines.

We have taken into account a one-year commitment period with no upfront costs in order to compare discounted pricing across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

For your knowledge:
AWS currently provides Standard RIs, Convertible RIs, and Scheduled RIs as its three different reserved instances. With each sort of RI strategy, these RIs are different. For companies that are certain they will last longer, all three cloud platforms also offer a three-year commitment plan. AWS offers a set average discount of 40% for all 1-year commitment plans regardless of the instance type, in contrast to Azure and Google Cloud's similar 3-year commitment plans.

Comparison of Cloud Pricing: Per Second Billing

AWS's per-second pricing

AWS made the capability of paying for EC2 Linux-based instances and EBS volumes on a per-second basis known in 2017. Per-second billing is still used today for them and has been somewhat expanded to other services as well. Even though second-wise charges for Windows, RHEL, or SLES are not explicitly mentioned in the documentation, numerous users have shared in developer forums how their AWS Services for Windows are invoiced per second. While some think it might be a problem and others think it might be a test conducted by AWS, neither idea has been confirmed by an official statement as of yet. However, AWS has formally stated that all Linux instances will be charged per second for each half instance a user consumes in an hour. It's important to remember that per-second billing has a minimum 60-second restriction.

The on-demand pricing plans for companies in all formally declared regions with AWS instances zones are subject to this per-second invoicing.

Azure's per-second charging

Since late 2019, Azure has begun permitting second-wise charges without a long-term commitment, but not all instances have been made available. Because their per-second billing still primarily focuses on container-based instances, they are still labeled as being billed by the minute.

Sanders said that Microsoft wanted to concentrate on containers rather than standard virtual machines because they think that's where per-second billing made the most sense. He stated, "We're continually seeking to improve billing constructs across our platform and to make it more user-friendly and responsive for our clients."