So, how does GCE stack up to AWS, at least as far as these fairly simplistic benchmarks go?
• If you’re going to buy instances on demand, don’t need the capacity of Amazon’s high-compute instances, and only care about single-core performance, GCE beats AWS as far as these benchmarks go. Amazon really seems to be giving up the very cheap end of the market (meaning the < $50/month on-demand segment) by not offering an update to the previous-generation m1.small family. The GCE g1-small is around $39/month and returned a single-core score of 891, whereas Amazon’s m1.small is around $43/month on demand and returned a single-core score of 176.
Perhaps a better comparison going forward is the GCE n1-standard-1, which is around $95/month and returned a single-core score of 1872, whereas Amazon’s new c3.large (which has the same number of cores and memory as the n1-standard-1) is around $108/month on demand, and returned a single-core score of 1524.
• When you shift to AWS reserved pricing (and here, I’m looking at the absolute cheapest option that AWS offers --three-year, heavy utilization), many of the tables are turned. Now, the c3.large is $65/month (single-core score of 1524), which is better price-per-performance (on these benchmarks) than the n1-standard-1 ($95/mo for 1872) and the n1-highcpu-2 ($117/mo for 1687). Still, GCE wins at the < $50/mo end, though, with both the f1-micro and g1-small beating AWS’s cheapest options.
• GCE is just starting to compete against AWS’s high-compute instances with its recently announced instance types that are in limited preview (and aren’t tested here). For now, it's probably best to think about AWS v. GCE just in terms of the AWS m3 family against GCE highmem, and the AWS c3 family against GCE standard and highcpu (the c3 instances have half as much memory as GCE standard and twice as much memory as GCE highcpu).
• As with the single-core benchmarks, GCE generally offers better price-per-performance than AWS on-demand pricing across its instance types when looking at the one-thread-per-core UnixBench results, but it’s close. Perhaps the best example of this is looking at the c3.large ($108/mo on-demand, 1867) against the n1-standard-1 ( $95/mo, 1872, same amount of memory as the c3.large) and the n1-highcpu-2 (~ $117/mo, 1916, but half as much memory as the c3.large).
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• As with the single-core benchmarks, if you’re willing to buy reserved instances at Amazon, AWS beats GCE at price-per-performance for similar instances. The c3.large, with a three-year heavy reserved instance, averages out to close to $65/mo (UnixBench multi-threaded score of 1867), and has essentially the same score as the n1-standard-1 (1867), which is close to 50% more expensive at around $95/mo. Even if you bought the cheapest reserved c3.large with AWS (one-year light utilization), you’d still pay less than GCE, at around $81/mo.
• Looking at the high end of what GCE offers on the CPU-heavy side, the n1-highcpu-8 ($470/mo, UnixBench multi-threaded score of 5567, 7.2GB RAM) and n1-standard-8 ($763/mo, 5146, 30GB RAM) do not offer quite as much price per performance as the c3.4xlarge with a three-year heavy utilization reserved instance ($521/mo, 6924, 30GB RAM) or even with a one-year light utilization reserved instance ($646/mo).
• The high-memory side is a bit harder to compare, mainly because AWS’s new m3 family caps out at the m3.2xlarge, which compares favorably to the n1-highmem-4 (fairly equivalent with on-demand pricing; AWS offers significantly better price for performance with reserved instances, and the m3.2xlarge comes with 4GB more RAM). But even though AWS doesn’t have an m3 instance type to compete with the n1-highmem-8 ($879/mo, 5052, 52GB RAM), the new c3.8xlarge ($1,042/mo, three-year heavy, 8472, 60GB RAM) has more RAM and significantly better performance.
Next: Final Observations
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