Comparing cloud pricing is quite a complicated task. It can be difficult to make apple-to-apple comparisons because respective cloud providers offer different pricing models, discount and promotion offer.
This article is just to start with a simple and basic compute engine or virtual machine offered by Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure and Google’s GCP.
Basic requirement
A VM with 1 vCPU, 1GB Memory, 40GB SSD and located in Singapore
Excluding free tier
| Cloud Service Provider | Alibaba Cloud ECS | AWS EC2 | Azure VM | GCP Compute Engine |
| Compute Service | 1 Core CPU 1GB Memory 1TB Data Transfer | t2.micro 1 vCPU 1 GB Memory | B1S 1 Core CPU 1GB Memory | n1-Standard-1 1 vCPU 3.75GB Memory |
| Disk Size | 40GB SSD Cloud Disk | 40GB General Purpose SSD | Standard S4 32GB Disk | 40GB SSD storage |
| Max Cost Per Month | USD $4.5/month | USD $15.49/month | USD $11.42/month | USD $37.42/month |
- Cost for Alibaba Cloud ECS Starter is the lower cost, fixed at $4.50/month
- AWS’s Elastic Compute Cloud monthly cost is between $11.44 (On Demand) and $15.49 (1 Year No Upfront Reserved)
- Azure Virtual Machine monthly cost is $7.70 with 1 year reserved options or $11.42 Pay as you go.
- Google’ GCP Compute Engine monthly cost is $37.19, however you can get 30% net discount for instances that run the entire month.
Note
This comparison excludes Data Transfer, Load Balancing, etc
You’re welcome to leave comment on the compute engine pricing below.