Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Amazon LightSail vs Google Compute Engine: What are the differences?
Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS. 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; Google Compute Engine: Run large-scale workloads on virtual machines hosted on Google's infrastructure. 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.
Amazon LightSail and Google Compute Engine belong to "Cloud Hosting" category of the tech stack.
According to the StackShare community, Google Compute Engine has a broader approval, being mentioned in 592 company stacks & 427 developers stacks; compared to Amazon LightSail, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.
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.
GCE is much more user friendly than EC2, though Amazon has come a very long way since the early days (pre-2010's). This can be seen in how easy it is to edit the storage attached to an instance in GCE: it's under the instance details and is edited inline. In AWS you have to click the instance > click the storage block device (new screen) > click the edit option (new modal) > resize the volume > confirm (new model) then wait a very long time. Google's is nearly instant.
- In both cases, the instance much be shut down.
There also the preference between "user burden-of-security" and automatic security: AWS goes for the former, GCE the latter.
Pros of Amazon LightSail
- Low cost4
- Simple Deployment4
- Simple pricing scheme1
Pros of Google Compute Engine
- Backed by google87
- Easy to scale79
- High-performance virtual machines75
- Performance58
- Fast and easy provisioning52
- Load balancing15
- Compliance and security12
- Kubernetes9
- GitHub Integration8
- Consistency7
- Good documentation3
- One Click Setup Options3
- Free $300 credit (12 months)3
- Ease of Use and GitHub support2
- Great integration and product support2
- Escort2
- Integration with mobile notification services1
- Easy Snapshot and Backup feature1
- Low cost1
- Support many OS1
- Very Reliable1
- Nice UI1