Overview

Amazon EC2

Stacks48.9K

Followers36.0K

Votes2.5K

Linode

Stacks749

Followers623

Votes422

Microsoft Azure

Stacks25.2K

Followers17.6K

Votes768

Amazon EC2 vs Linode vs Microsoft Azure: What are the differences?

## Key Differences Between Amazon EC2, Linode, and Microsoft Azure

Amazon EC2, Linode, and Microsoft Azure are popular cloud computing platforms offering virtual servers for various businesses and developers. Below are the key differences:

1. **Scalability and Flexibility**: Amazon EC2 provides auto-scaling capabilities, allowing users to easily adjust their computing capacity based on demand, while Linode offers fixed plans with limited customization options. Microsoft Azure offers both manual and automated scaling options, providing users with flexibility in managing resources.
  
2. **Pricing Structure**: Amazon EC2 has a pay-per-use pricing model that charges users based on the resources consumed, whereas Linode offers a flat-rate pricing structure which can be cost-effective for certain use cases. Microsoft Azure provides a flexible pricing model with various discount options based on usage and commitment levels.

3. **Geographical Availability**: Amazon EC2 has a more extensive global presence with multiple data centers across various regions, providing users with low latency and high availability. Linode and Microsoft Azure also have global data centers but may not have the same level of coverage as Amazon EC2 in certain regions.

4. **Support and Documentation**: Amazon EC2 offers extensive documentation, tutorials, and a dedicated support system, making it easier for users to get started and troubleshoot issues. Linode also provides comprehensive documentation and a robust community forum for support. Microsoft Azure offers personalized support options for different service tiers, ensuring users receive tailored assistance based on their needs.

5. **Service Offerings**: Amazon EC2 has a wide range of services and integrations, including databases, AI/ML tools, and storage solutions, making it a comprehensive cloud computing platform. Linode focuses primarily on virtual servers and networking services, targeting users who require essential cloud infrastructure. Microsoft Azure offers a vast array of services, including IoT, DevOps, and analytics, catering to diverse business requirements.

6. **Security and Compliance**: Amazon EC2, Linode, and Microsoft Azure all prioritize security and compliance measures, with features such as encryption, access controls, and compliance certifications. However, the specific security offerings and compliance standards may vary, requiring users to evaluate their specific requirements and regulations.

In Summary, Amazon EC2, Linode, and Microsoft Azure differ in terms of scalability, pricing, geographical availability, support, service offerings, and security measures, catering to various business needs in the cloud computing space.

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Advice on Amazon EC2, Linode, Microsoft Azure

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.

200k views200k

Comments

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.

264k views264k

Comments

Rodrigo

SRE

Jul 30, 2021

Decided

Albeit restricted to only a few places worlwide compared to its peers in the cloud segment, I am yet to find another provider capable of delivering a score over 5000 (Geekbench) in a benchmark on a single CPU machine, and each machine costs $6 a month. For homelab and experienced users who don't need DBaaS or IaaC's, it's a pretty straightforward choice. A more comprehensive review of Vultr's HF machines can be found here.

70.2k views70.2k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon EC2	Linode	Microsoft Azure
It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.	Get a server running in minutes with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and node location.	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.
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.	Deploy multiple Linux distributions;Create Configuration Profiles which associate disk images and device nodes;Boot between configuration profiles;Share disk images between configuration profiles;Resize disk images;Network and CPU usage graphs;Multiple IP address support;Managed/hosted DNS service with slave support;Custom reverse DNS (rdns);Access Out of band console access using Lish;Lish menu system to issue jobs to your Linode;Lish access via SSH keys;Support for booting into single user mode, init=/bin/bash;Support for booting with a custom "root=" kernel parameter;Support for booting with an initrd;Bootable recovery distribution (Finnix);Add and remove extra resources to and from your Linode;Shutdown Watchdog will automatically reboot your Linode in case of a crash;Clone a Linode to another;Move IPs from one Linode to another;IP address fail over support for high availability setups	Use your OS, language, database, tool;Global datacenter footprint;Enterprise Grade with up to a 99.95% monthly SLA;Web Sites- Get started for free and scale up as your traffic grows. Build with ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js and deploy in seconds with FTP, Git or TFS.;Infrastructure Services- Access scalable, on-demand infrastructure using Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks. Take advantage of what you already know to achieve new capabilities in the cloud.;Mobile Services- App development with a scalable and secure backend hosted in Windows Azure. Incorporate structured storage, user authentication and push notifications in minutes.;Cloud Services- Create highly-available, infinitely scalable applications and services using a rich Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment. Support multi-tier scenarios, automated deployments and elastic scale.;Big Data- Process, analyze, and gain new insights from big data using the power of Apache Hadoop.;Media- Create, manage and distribute media in the cloud. This PaaS offering provides everything from encoding to content protection to streaming and analytics support.
Statistics
Stacks 48.9K	Stacks 749	Stacks 25.2K
Followers 36.0K	Followers 623	Followers 17.6K
Votes 2.5K	Votes 422	Votes 768
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 100 Extremely reliable 70 Good value 60 Great customer support 58 Easy to configure 37 Great documentation Cons 2 No "floating IP" support	Pros 114 Scales well and quite easy 96 Can use .Net or open source tools 81 Startup friendly 73 Startup plans via BizSpark 62 High performance Cons 7 Confusing UI 2 Expensive plesk on Azure
Integrations
No integrations available	No integrations available	New Relic Twilio SendGrid Cloudinary Redis Cloud Bitnami AWS Cloud9 MongoLab AppDynamics Cloudant CopperEgg

What are some alternatives to Amazon EC2, Linode, Microsoft Azure?

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.

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.

Scaleway

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

Rackspace Cloud Servers

Cloud Servers is based on OpenStack, the open and scalable operating system for building public and private clouds. With the open cloud, you get reliable cloud hosting, without locking your data into one proprietary platform.

Google Cloud Platform

It helps you build what's next with secure infrastructure, developer tools, APIs, data analytics and machine learning. It is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search and YouTube.

Gandi

Gandi VPS Cloud Hosting offers you a flexible server with dedicated resources. The VPS virtualization is made possible by Xen technology.

WebFaction

No need to spend hours installing and configuring the software, database and other tools. We have over 50 one-click installers in our control panel.

Joyent Cloud

Joyent is the high-performance cloud infrastructure company, offering the only solution specifically built to power real-time web and mobile applications.

Vultr

Strategically located in 16 datacenters around the globe and provides frictionless provisioning of public cloud, storage and single-tenant bare metal.

Amazon LightSail

Everything you need to jumpstart your project on AWS—compute, storage, and networking—for a low, predictable price. Launch a virtual private server with just a few clicks.