5 Best AWS Alternatives in 2020
Amazon Web Services have been the leader in the cloud services industry for quite some time now. They have become the go-to of many people when it comes to getting things done on the cloud. Their success hugely depends on the catalog of services they offer to the customers. The number of services they offer is really unmatched and to be honest, other IaaS companies are just playing catch up at this point.
These services are a key factor why people choose AWS for their cloud needs but as they say the more the better doesn’t work in every scenario. Customers desire features but they at times get lost in this plethora of services and using AWS becomes a mystery for them rather than a solution. These services are not the only issue that is persistent with AWS, their billing system is a complex mess too.
Organizations at times are not able to comprehend what is causing their AWS bill to reach such levels and so it may not be the best cloud service for you. But as a consumer, this is a great time to be alive because there are some amazing options available that provide cloud services. There are a number of cloud services providers all having their own unique features and in this article, we’re going to have a look at them.
Best AWS Alternatives you should look at
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft has been in the enterprise solutions market for a long time now. Office 365, Windows operating system, Microsoft team, and many such products have proved their credibility and reliability in enterprise solutions. This is the reason why many organizations that are already using Microsoft’s professional services can opt for Microsoft Azure cloud services.
The organizations that are already using Microsoft’s services and engineers who have used C# and .Net for their applications will find it very easy to get on-board with Microsoft Azure. But it is also relatively easier to understand even if you are not familiar with Microsoft’s services. With their Azure Stack functionality, and the agility that it brings has made them the ideal hybrid cloud solutions platform.
The caveat of joining Azure is that when you take in use of their services for the first time, they give you a $200 credit and in addition to this you will be provided with a year-long free subscription of 25 Azure tools. One benefit you can get from the credit you receive is that you can deploy and test your applications using these credits and scale accordingly if the configuration suits your needs. So, it can prove to be a good AWS alternative for you.
Google Cloud Platform
There’s no one escaping Google services in today’s time and Google Cloud Platform is built for the same purpose i.e., to lure into the Google Ecosystem completely. Google has been providing so many of its services on the cloud, like Google Docs, Google Keep, Google Drive so there is no doubt about the robustness of their cloud services. In addition to all this Android is one of the key selling points for their cloud platform.
The Android app market is a billion-dollar business so the engineers who want to develop Android apps can really benefit from the integration that Google Cloud provides. Google has been really focused on cloud container optimization and this has resulted in them being the experts when it comes to deployment, orchestration, and management of containers. Google cloud platform is known for its high uptime and performance. They swept the market away with this through their Kubernetes platform. So it is one of the best AWS alternatives.
Google Cloud Platform has been able to provide all these services with such excellent performance and reliability because they have an SSD based infrastructure and to handle all this they have well-trained experts. Their billing cycle is also way better and they charge you for just for the services you’re using and for this, they use minute level billing.
IBM Cloud
IBM is the market leader in enterprise solutions from the beginning of the market of enterprise solutions. They entered the cloud market a bit later than the other tech giants but they had made sure that what they offer is robust and durable. The caveat with the IBM cloud, however, is that they are suitable for organizations and not so for individuals and small groups.
The reason for the success of the IBM cloud is that they provide a bare-metal server that is used by just a single tenant and unlike AWS it is not shared with anyone else. This cuts down the extra effort of handling the hypervisor layer and instead, the server is fully focused on serving the needs of your application. This facilitates the handling of a large number of input/output operations due to reliable network performance and proves to be a great AWS alternative.
In addition to all this, one of the USP that IBM Cloud has is its Softlayer service with the help of which you can switch between virtualized environments and bare-metal environments very easily. Also, its servers are well equipped with machine learning APIs and have the ability to take on AI tasks. However, their billing system is different and does not provide pay as you go functionality.
Kamatera
Kamatera has been touted as one of the best AWS alternatives in recent years and there are solid reasons behind that. If we take a look into the infrastructure of Kamatera, they take in use Intel Xeon Platinum CPUs which are state of the art. In addition to this, they use an all SSD drives storage solution, they have high-speed network connectivity and this contributes to the robustness of their services.
To provide the best performance to their customers they have data centers in 13 different places spread across 4 continents. They facilitate easy scaling up options and also have some very powerful APIs that give you the ability to remotely maintain your server and also provide advanced management consoles.
They even have more than 100 Linux distributions for you to choose from. They have the ability to deploy a virtual machine for you regardless of the operating system within a minute. The main area where Kamater is winning is the pricing structure and personalized customer support.
They have affordable plans and services which start for as low as $4 dollars a month and for being completely sure about the platform they offer you a 30-day trial too. They have a 24/7/365 customer support where you won’t be talking to machines and bots but actual humans to get your issues resolved. All this makes it a very compelling AWS alternative.
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean was one of the first ones to take in use an SSD based infrastructure for cloud services. They have data centers in 12 giant data centers to provide unmatched performance and durability to their customers. In addition to all this 40Gbps network connectivity helps them achieve a 99.99% uptime.
As we discussed earlier that the main problem with AWS is the complexity that confuses the customers. DigitalOcean combats this problem by providing you pre-made plans like 1GB RAM, 25GB of storage, and 1TB of monthly transfer so that you can make an easy decision according to your needs. You can make custom plans for you as you scale up and DigitalOcean has a robust infrastructure to handle that too.
One feature that makes DigitalOcean stand out from its competitors is its one-click app installer. Rather than running command lines, you can just use their one-click installer to install apps like Node.js, Wordpress, Docker, etc. They support an expansive variety of distros like Fendora, CentOs, Debian, etc. They offer a wide variety of storage options too be it block storage, object storage, and a variety of services too like load balancers.
Still Confused?
Choosing a cloud service provider can be a tough task but if you have someone to guide you it becomes much easier. We at Opslyft have a team of cloud experts and enthusiasts that can analyze your current infrastructure and guide you through each minute step of choosing a cloud service provider. We don’t stop there, cloud brings in cost discrepancy and infrastructure problems. We help in optimizing cloud infrastructure and help organizations reduce their cloud bills significantly.
