Cloud Pricing Comparison 2021: AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud

Synopsis

The most dynamic and popular cloud providers in the digital world are AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM. They are gaining wide eminence due to continuous price drops of cloud instances, adding discounting options and instances, and calling off the billing increments in specific instances. The below blog takes you through the virtual instances’ pricing comparisons enabling you to choose the one which is the cheapest yet highly productive.

Price changing frequencies have led to difficulty making cloud pricing comparisons between AWS, Azure, and Google cloud. These variations may provide monetary value to what you pay today for availing cloud services. However, it showcases some of the most valuable observations in terms of cost differences that may not have been identified so far. Nevertheless, this will help you out to make a perfect budget estimation for your next software development project.

More than 75% of the organization’s cloud is represented by computing resources. Of course, what you pay for is all about the compute instances. Further, you will be diving into a brief explanation on the pricing of Virtual machines, Instances: in short comparison between AWS EC2 vs. Azure VMs and Google Clouds VMs. As you glance over the cost of instances, you come across various price ranges. The reason why it becomes so crucial to check the instances is that it helps to reduce the billing amount of the subscribers. The slightest of the difference in the instance pricing leads to saving several thousand dollars into the cloud bill.

To have a clear understanding of the price differences, we will take the same region for CPU and OS comparisons for AWS instances, Azure Virtual Machines, and Google Cloud machines. We shall consider

• US East-North Virginia as a Region
• Linux and Windows as Operating System
• 4 as CPUs/Cores

Quick Links

Various Types of Instances

Pricing On-Demand

Pricing Discounted

Pricing Per-second

Pricing Serverless

Key Takeaways

Per-second Billing – Google Cloud

Previously, Google Cloud used to bill per hour, followed by per minute just as AWS does. When AWS announced the possibility of per-second billing, Google Cloud followed suit. The second-wise billing offered by Google Cloud is much better than that of AWS as the latter provides this service only on Linux-based instances. And with Google Cloud, per-second charges are applicable to all VM-based instances. They have now improved their invoicing capacities with a reduction in user burden and focusing on the granularity of seconds.

For Google Cloud, all the instances are measured in the number of seconds, and after each minute, the instances are billed in 1-second increments. Also, you need to keep this mind that if the virtual machine runs for anywhere in between 30 seconds and 1 minute, then the instance is considered to be terminated and yet is still billed for 1 minute of usage.

Scenario

You have allocated 512MB of memory to your function, executed it 3 million times in one month, and ran it fro 1 second each time.

Note:
Amazon’s API Gateway price per million requests and HTTP invocation cost are not considered in the above scenario. The charges calculation will remain as below.

AWS Lambda Pricing

Monthly compute charges:

• The monthly compute price is $0.00001667 per GB-second (GB-s), and the free tier provides 400,000 GB-second (GB-s).
• Total compute (seconds) = 3M * (1s) = 3,000,000 seconds
• Total compute (GB-s) = 3,000,000 * 512MB/1024 = 1,500,000 GB-s
• Total compute – Free tier compute = Monthly billable-compute GB- s
• 1,500,000 GB-s – 400,000 free tier GB-s = 1,100,000 GB-s
• Monthly compute charges = 1,100,000 * $0.00001667 = $18.34

Monthly request charges:

• The monthly request price is $0.20 per 1 million requests, and the free tier provides 1M requests per month.
• Total requests – Free tier requests = Monthly billable requests
• 3M requests – 1M free tier requests = 2M Monthly billable requests
• Monthly request charges = 2M * $0.2/M = $0.40

Total monthly charges:

Total price per month for AWS Lambda = Compute charges + Request charges = $18.34 + $0.40 = $18.74 per month.

Azure Functions Pricing

Resource consumption (seconds):

• Execution number = 3 million executions
• Execution duration = 1 second
• Total resource consumption = 3 million executions * 1 second = 3,000,000 seconds

Resource consumption GigaByte Second (GBs):

• Resource consumption in GBs = 512 MB / 1,024 MB = 0.5 GB
• Execution time (seconds) = 3 million seconds
• Total consumed GBs = 3 million seconds * 0.5 GB = 1.5 million GBs

Billable resource:

• Resource consumption = 1.5 million GBs
• Monthly free grant = 4,00,00 GBs
• Total billable consumption = 1.5 million GBs – 4,00,000 GBs = 1.1 million GBs

Monthly resource-consumption price:

• Billable resource consumption = 1.1 million GBs
• Resource-consumption price = $0.000016/GB
• Total monthly resource-consumption cost = 1.1 million GBs * 0.000016/GB = $17.60

Execution billing:

• Total monthly execution = 3 million executions
• Monthly free executions = 1 million executions
• Total monthly billable executions = 3 million executions – 1 million executions = 2 million executions

Monthly execution price:

• Monthly billable execution = 2 million executions
• Price per million execution = $0.20
• Monthly execution cost = 2 million executions * 0.20 = $0.40

Final total monthly bill:

• Monthly resource-consumption cost = $17.60
• Monthly executions cost = $0.40
• Total monthly cost for Azure Functions = $17.60 + $0.40 = $18

Google Cloud Functions Pricing

Invocation:
(512 MB / 1024 MB) * 1 second = 0.5 GB-s per invocation
For 512 MB, Google cloud offers an 800MHz CPU. So, GB-seconds would be:
(800 / 1000) * 1 seconds = 0.8 GHz-second per invocation

Per second usage:

• 3,000,000 million executions * 0.5 GB-s = 1,500,000 GB-s per month
• 3,000,000 million execution * 0.8 GB-s = 2,400,000 GHz-s per month

Google Cloud offers a free tier of 2,000,000 invocations, 400,000 GB-seconds, and 200,000 GHz-seconds per month. Hence, the billing would be as follows:

Invocation:

• 3,000,000 – 2,000,000 = 1,000,000 million execution * $0.0000004 = $0.4

GB-second:

• 1,500,000 – 400,000 = 1,100,000 * $0.0000025 = $2.75

GHz-second:

• 2,400,000 – 200,000 = 2,200,000 * $0.0000100 = $22

Total price per month for Google Cloud Functions = $0.4 + $2.75 + $22 = $25.15

Conclusion

With the aim of becoming a reputed organization, you need to consider several aspects before choosing a cloud service provider. The pricing part cannot be ignored at all. If millions of users use your application and you are going to use thousands of instances, this comparison will help you save many dollars.

Further, if you are planning to build a customized application embedded with cloud capabilities, or migrating to cloud services, or if you are struggling with the current infrastructure and want to check the costs and scalability, we can surely help you. Check out our Serverless services and head on to creating a next-gen cloud-centric application.