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IaaS Performance Benchmarks Part 4: Google Compute Engine: Page 3 of 3

These benchmark results show how important Amazon’s m3 and c3 families are to its competition with Google Compute Engine. When GCE was initially announced, those instance types didn't exist, and any comparison similar to this one would have overwhelmingly favored GCE. I don’t expect GCE to stay static, either -- presumably Google will be rolling out more regions and more zones, and when it does, it may take that opportunity to leapfrog Amazon or just cut prices on existing services.

Also, it’s clear that AWS is currently giving up the very low end of the IaaS market (below 15 cents/hour on demand). And for the many people using AWS solely on-demand for compute -- or who run instances for less than an hour at a time on a regular basis and would benefit significantly from per-minute pricing -- GCE offers better price for performance, accordingly to the simple benchmark runs here.

I strongly favor a multi-cloud strategy built through abstraction layers (instead of lots of vendor-specific API calls), and, as such, Google Compute Engine is solid choice for your primary or secondary IaaS vendor, provided that you can get all of the functionality you need through GCE’s services.

Next up in my IaaS performance benchmark series: Azure.