AWS and Rackspace are among the leading public cloud infrastructure service providers and. offer competitive pricing. They each have their strengths which need to be looked at carefully to determine which one fits customer needs the best.
2.1. Amazon Web Services
Founded in 2006, Amazon’s AWS has about the same computing capacity as the next 12 vendors combined. So, nobody, not even fellow corporate titans Google and Microsoft, can really compete with Amazon on capacity. Not many can also compete on the breadth of offerings of AWS – storage, compute, databases, networking, configuration management, content delivery and many more.
Amazon also owns the largest data centers in the world. AWS data centers are in 9 regions around the world: 3 in the US and the other 6 scattered strategically around the world. In 2013 Amazon also won a contract to create GovCloud, a private cloud expressly for the U.S. government. Clearly, Amazon is the leader when it comes to cloud service providers. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon. AWS proper rolled out in 2006 and has grown at astonishing speed to quickly become the market leader in IaaS / PaaS. The EC2 service is a major part of this success story, allowing users to quickly choose from a range of virtual servers. AWS also offers the following services as part of AWS:
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Storage (with the S3 & Glacier products).
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Databases (RDS, RedShift, SimpleDB, DynamoDB).
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Networking (Route 53, VPC).
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Deployment & Configuration Management (OpsWorks, Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation).
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Content Delivery (CloudFront).
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Load balancing.
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Application development platforms.
With their wide array of services, direct comparisons between the two cloud providers can be difficult. So, we focus on two most important components – compute and storage. They seem to be closely matched in terms of pricing – knowing how competitive the IaaS market is, this is not a coincidence. Overall, AWS is cheaper, though this comes with some caveats as discussed later. And Amazon is also fond of regular price reductions – the business model for AWS seems to be thin-margin, high-volume.
AWS also has a variety of storage options including Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), and RedShift the data warehousing platform. In the AWS marketplace users can spin up hundreds of types of services, like enterprise applications from SAP, or performance optimization tools from Riverbed and others.
AWS is much more flexible than others. In EC2 you can mix and match components from the server stack and pay for each independently and AWS offers a ‘Free Usage Tier’ for new customers; you get a small ‘starter’ server, but you must still first provide your credit card details.