When people think of cloud computing, they almost automatically think of Amazon EC2. Amazon has become the cloud computing company and is commonly perceived as the cheapest, if not the only, IaaS provider. But is this really so? Let’s play Myth Busters as on the Discovery Channel. Cloud Computing Myth Busters!We will compare all of Amazon’s instances from Standard line with prices for cloud servers of at least the same parameters from other cloud computing providers. For this purpose we will use Cloudorado - the cloud computing price comparison engine. For Amazon to be considered the cheapest, it would have to be the cheapest for every instance type they provide, since these are their strongest points. If this is not met, there is no point in checking any further.
We will assume only cloud server costs. No transfer, licenses or load balancers. We will choose a full month of computing with on-demand prices. We could expand it to other instance types and other combinations, but there's no need to drag this article out with too many variations when you could easily try them on your own with the cloud hosting price comparison engine.
We will also provide one extension to Cloudorado calculations. As Amazon does not have persistent instance storage as other providers, we will also provide additional calculation of instances with a persistent EBS storage of equal size to instance storage. Unfortunately the cost of the EBS service depends on both size and number of I/O requests. As an estimate of I/O requests cost, we will use 100 I/O per second, resulting in $26 per month as indicated by Amazon in Projecting Costs section of EBS description.
OK, with all assumptions explained, let’s start!
