Overview

Amazon EC2

Stacks48.9K

Followers36.0K

Votes2.5K

Equinix Metal

Stacks43

Followers62

Votes8

Amazon EC2 vs Packet: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Amazon EC2 and Packet are both cloud computing platforms that offer virtual servers to businesses and individuals. While they share similarities in terms of their purpose, there are key differences between them that make each platform unique and suitable for different use cases.

Billing Model: One of the key differences between Amazon EC2 and Packet is their billing model. Amazon EC2 offers a pay-as-you-go model, where users are charged based on the actual usage of resources. On the other hand, Packet follows a fixed pricing model, where users pay a fixed monthly fee for a specific set of resources, regardless of the actual utilization.
Infrastructure Control: Another significant difference is the level of infrastructure control provided by each platform. Amazon EC2 is a fully managed service, meaning that users have limited control over the underlying infrastructure. In contrast, Packet offers a bare metal infrastructure, allowing users to have complete control over the hardware and software stack, offering higher customization and performance tuning.
Hardware Options: Amazon EC2 provides a wide range of virtual machine instance types that cater to various computing needs, such as general-purpose, memory-optimized, or GPU-accelerated instances. On the other hand, Packet primarily focuses on bare metal servers, offering high-performance hardware with dedicated resources for increased reliability and performance.
Integration with AWS Services: As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) product, Amazon EC2 seamlessly integrates with various other AWS services, such as Amazon S3 for scalable storage or Amazon RDS for managed databases. In contrast, Packet does not have the same level of integration with AWS services, which may impact the ease of building a comprehensive cloud infrastructure.
Global Availability: Being part of AWS, Amazon EC2 has a global presence with data centers distributed across multiple regions worldwide. This allows users to deploy their applications closer to their target audience for lower latency and improved performance. On the other hand, Packet has a more limited availability, with data centers primarily located in North America and Europe.
Community and Support: Amazon EC2 benefits from a large and established community support, with extensive documentation, forums, and tutorials available for users to seek help or share knowledge. Packet, being a smaller and relatively newer player, may have a smaller community and support network, although they still provide customer support to their users.

In summary, Amazon EC2 and Packet differ in their billing models, infrastructure control, hardware options, integration with other services, global availability, and community support. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses, making it essential for users to evaluate their specific requirements before choosing the most suitable platform for their needs.

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Advice on Amazon EC2, Equinix Metal

Craig

Principal Consultant at Rootwork InfoTech LLC

Jul 16, 2020

Decided

We first selected Google Cloud Platform about five years ago, because HIPAA compliance was significantly cheaper and easier on Google compared to AWS. We have stayed with Google Cloud because it provides an excellent command line tool for managing resources, and every resource has a well-designed, well-documented API. SDKs for most of these APIs are available for many popular languages. I have never worked with a cloud platform that's so amenable to automation. Google is also ahead of its competitors in Kubernetes support.

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Jerome/Zen

Software Engineer

Aug 2, 2020

Needs advice

DigitalOcean was where I began; its USD5/month is extremely competitive and the overall experience as highly user-friendly.

However, their offerings were lacking and integrating with other resources I had on AWS was getting more costly (due to transfer costs on AWS). Eventually I moved the entire project off DO's Droplets and onto AWS's EC2.

One may initially find the cost (w/o free tier) and interface of AWS daunting however with good planning you can achieve highly cost-efficient systems with savings plans, spot instances, etcetera.

Do not dive into AWS head-first! Seriously, don't. Stand back and read pricing documentation thoroughly. You can, not to the fault of AWS, easily go way overbudget. Your first action upon getting your AWS account should be to set up billing alarms for estimated and current bill totals.

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Tejas

Founder, CEO at Thalia Technologies

Apr 9, 2021

Decided

Our company builds micro saas applications. Based on the application we decide whether to deploy it over one of our shared servers or on a dedicated server.

We decided to Lightsail over EC2.

Lightsail is a lightweight, simplified product offering that has a dramatically simplified console. The instances run in a special VPC, but this aspect is also provisioned automatically, and invisible in the console.
Lightsail supports optionally peering this hidden VPC with your default VPC in the same AWS region, allowing Lightsail instances to access services like EC2 and RDS in the default VPC within the same AWS account.
Bandwidth is unlimited, but of course free bandwidth is not -- however, Lightsail instances do include a significant monthly bandwidth allowance before any bandwidth-related charges apply.
It has predictable pricing with no surprises at the end.
The flexibility of EC2 leads inevitably to complexity. Whereas for Lighsail there is virtually no learning curve, here. You don't even technically need to know how to use SSH with a private key -- the Lightsail console even has a built-in SSH client -- but there is no requirement that you use it. You can access these instances normally, with a standard SSH client.

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Detailed Comparison

Amazon EC2	Equinix Metal
It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.	As part of Equinix — the world’s digital infrastructure company — we provide automated & interconnected infrastructure. Formerly Packet, now Equinix Metal™.
Elastic – Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously.;Completely Controlled – You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine.;Flexible – You have the choice of multiple instance types, operating systems, and software packages. Amazon EC2 allows you to select a configuration of memory, CPU, instance storage, and the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) to provide a complete solution for computing, query processing and storage across a wide range of applications.;Reliable – Amazon EC2 offers a highly reliable environment where replacement instances can be rapidly and predictably commissioned. The Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement commitment is 99.95% availability for each Amazon EC2 Region.;Secure – Amazon EC2 works in conjunction with Amazon VPC to provide security and robust networking functionality for your compute resources.;Inexpensive – Amazon EC2 passes on to you the financial benefits of Amazon’s scale. You pay a very low rate for the compute capacity you actually consume.;Easy to Start – Quickly get started with Amazon EC2 by visiting AWS Marketplace to choose preconfigured software on Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You can quickly deploy this software to EC2 via 1-Click launch or with the EC2 console.	Automated bare metal; Native Equinix Fabric integration; AMD, Arm and Intel Configs; Simple hourly pricing starting at $.50/hr; CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Flatcar Linux, Windows, ESXi, and FreeBSD on demand; Cloud-Init and Cloud-Config compatible; Advanced network with native IPv6; Bring your own IP space.
Statistics
Stacks 48.9K	Stacks 43
Followers 36.0K	Followers 62
Votes 2.5K	Votes 8
Pros & Cons
Pros 647 Quick and reliable cloud servers 515 Scalability 393 Easy management 277 Low cost 271 Auto-scaling Cons 14 Ui could use a lot of work 6 High learning curve when compared to PaaS 3 Extremely poor CPU performance	Pros 3 Great performance 3 No multi tenancy 2 Fantastic customer support
Integrations
No integrations available	Google Anthos Red Hat OpenShift Mist.io Ansible Terraform VMware vSphere Cloud 66 Docker Machine

What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2, Equinix Metal?

DigitalOcean

We take the complexities out of cloud hosting by offering blazing fast, on-demand SSD cloud servers, straightforward pricing, a simple API, and an easy-to-use control panel.

Microsoft Azure

Azure is an open and flexible cloud platform that enables you to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. You can build applications using any language, tool or framework. And you can integrate your public cloud applications with your existing IT environment.

Google Compute Engine

Google Compute Engine is a service that provides virtual machines that run on Google infrastructure. Google Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run up to thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed from the ground up to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.

Linode

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Scaleway

European cloud computing company proposing a complete & simple public cloud ecosystem, bare-metal servers & private datacenter infrastructures.

Rackspace Cloud Servers

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Google Cloud Platform

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Gandi

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WebFaction

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Joyent Cloud

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