Question

Listing the pricing differences between AWS, Azure and GCP? Which cloud provider is cheaper and cost-effective ?

Answer 1

Here are the pricing models that the leading cloud providers follow:

• AWS is done on Per-Hour basis

• Azure pricing model is known as Consumption offers, which is a pay per use model (or maybe a subscription model for a period of 6 months, etc.)

• Google Cloud Platform provides billing on a Per-Second basis

GCP is the most cost-effective/cheap cloud provider compared to other cloud service providers.

You can also save more as the Billing for AWS is done on a Per-Hour basis,  Microsoft Azure uses a pay per use model, whereas Google Cloud Platform provides billing on a Per-Second basis.

Moreover, Google Offers additional discounts for Long-Term usage and there are no Upfront Costs too.

Answer 2

I wouldn’t say that there is one “cheapest” cloud provider among the major options. Services across the providers have different pricing and are billed in different ways. For instance, in AWS, EC2 is charged per-hour or per-second depending on which instances you run. Azure Virtual Machines and Google Cloud offer a Pay as you go pricing model and per-second billing.

Each of the major cloud providers offer a number of discounted pricing and purchasing options to help you get the cheapest cloud services. 

• AWS Spot Instances – the best way to get the cheapest EC2 instance. This option offers heavy discounts for excess infrastructure, which can be reclaimed for other workloads at any time.

• Azure Low Priority VMs – similar to AWS’s spot instances, although there is a fixed discount for Azure’s offering, and a few other operational differences.

• Google Cloud Preemptible VMs – Google Cloud’s preemptible VMs are another similar option.

• Google Cloud Sustained Use Discounts – this is a built-in pricing mechanism for Google users that discounts pricing the more you run each server.

• Azure Dev/Test Pricing – a discounting option specifically for workloads used for development and testing. 

Also, all of the major cloud providers offer a pricing option for Reserved Instances – that is, if you commit to use capacity over time, you can pay a discounted price.  Reserved instances can save money as long as you use them the right way. Each cloud provider structures this option differently - here is what the options are:

• AWS Reserved Instances

• Azure Reserved Instances

• Google Committed Use Discounts