It is impossible to try to compare the pricing of these services without any context, as they are very different technologies, with different pricing plans. So, in this post, we are trying to determine the monthly price of each service in a constant context; our assumptions for all the services lay in the same range.
We also believe that a technology that seems to be the cheapest or the best suited in some contexts, shouldn’t have to be like this in other contexts.
Basic Assumptions:
- For scalable instances, we assumed the worst situation where each request is handled alone at a time.
- Whenever we have a free tier we applied it in the calculation.
- We assumed you have one project for each service.
Virtual Server Options
Two options here: Google Compute Engine, AWS EC2.
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine is the Infrastructure as a Service component of Google Cloud Platform which is built on the global infrastructure that runs Google’s search engine, Gmail, YouTube, and other services. Google Compute Engine enables users to launch virtual machines on demand.
Virtual machine pricing:
You’re supposed to choose a VM instance that meets your demands from the list provided by Google here. Google charges you for the compute resources (the usage of CPU, and the Memory ‘GB’) consumed by your VM instance monthly.
For the purpose of the price calculation, we assume choosing one of two instances from the standard machine type. While choosing the region to be Frankfurt.
| VM Type | Virtual CPUs | Memory (GB) | Price (Monthly) |
| n1-standard-1 | 1 | 3.75 | $31.27 |
| n1-standard-2 | 2 | 7.5 | $62.55 |
Disk pricing:
| Disk type | Price (GB/month) | Our need | What we will pay |
| Standard provisioned space | $0.040 | 2GB | $0.080 |
System image pricing:
| Image type | Price (GB/month) | Our need | What we will pay |
| Custom Image | $0.102 | 2 GB | $0.204 |
Network pricing:
| Transfer type | Price (per GB) | Our need | What we will pay |
| Egress | $0.12 (for the first TB) | 10 GB | $1.2 |
| Ingress | Free | – | $0.0 |
Total Price:
| VM | Disk | Image | Network | Total Price |
| n1-standard-1 | Standard provisioned 2GB | Custom 2GB | 10 GB out | $32.754 |
| n1-standard-2 | Standard provisioned 2GB | Custom 2GB | 10 GB out | $64.034 |
AWS EC2
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud forms a central part of Amazon.com’s cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services, by allowing users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications.
On-Demand
With On-Demand instances, you only pay for EC2 instances you use.
Computing price:
For the purpose of the price calculation, we assume choosing one of two instances from the general-purpose machines type. While choosing the region to be Al-Bahrain.
| Instance | vCPU (count) | Memory (GB) | Storage | System | Price/month |
| t3.small | 2 | 2 | EBS Only | Linux | $18.323 |
| t3.medium | 2 | 4 | EBS Only | Linux | $36.646 |
Data transfer price:
All data transfer IN to Amazon EC2 from the internet: Free.
Data transferred (IN/OUT) between Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon SES, Amazon SQS, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon ECR, Amazon SNS or Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon EC2 instances in the same AWS Region is free.
Data transfer OUT from Amazon EC2 to the internet:
| Price (per GB) | Our need | What we will pay |
| $0.117 (from over 1 GB to 9.999 TB) | 10 GB | $1.17 |
Disk storage:
For EBS pricing in detail, refer to here.
| Disk type | Price (GB/month) | Our need | What we will pay |
| General-purpose SSD | $0.121 | 2 GB | $0.242 |
Total Price:
| VM | Disk | System | Network | Total Price/month |
| t3.small | 2GB General purpose SSD | Linux | 10 GB out | $18.565 |
| t3.medium | 2GB General purpose SSD | Linux | 10 GB out | $36.888 |
Savings Plans
Savings Plans are a flexible pricing model that offers low prices on EC2 usage, in exchange for a commitment to a consistent amount of usage (measured in $/hour) for a 1 or 3-year term.
When you sign up for a Savings Plan, you will be charged the discounted Savings Plans price for your usage up to your commitment.
Computing price:
For 1 year commitment, in Al-Bahrain region.
| Instance | vCPU (count) | Memory (GB) | Storage | System | Price/month |
| t3.small | 2 | 2 | EBS Only | Linux | $14.965 |
| t3.medium | 2 | 4 | EBS Only | Linux | $30.003 |
However, you will be charged for the entire year:
For t3.small you will pay $179.58.
For t3.medium you will pay $360.036.
Data transfer price:
All data transfer IN to Amazon EC2 from the internet: Free.
Data transferred (IN/OUT) between Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon SES, Amazon SQS, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon ECR, Amazon SNS or Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon EC2 instances in the same AWS Region is free.
Data transfer OUT from Amazon EC2 to the internet:
| Price (per GB) | Our need | What we will pay |
| $0.117 (from over 1 GB to 9.999 TB) | 10 GB | $1.17 |
Disk storage:
For EBS pricing in detail, refer to here.
| Disk type | Price (GB/month) | Our need | What we will pay |
| General-purpose SSD | $0.121 | 2 GB | $0.242 |
Total price:
| VM | Disk | System | Network | Total Price/month |
| t3.small | 2GB General purpose SSD | Linux | 10 GB out | $15.207 |
| t3.medium | 2GB General purpose SSD | Linux | 10 GB out | $30.245 |
Amazon Lightsail
- If you are new to AWS and looking to deploy some servers for your applications then AWS Lightsail may be the best starting point for you.
- Unlike Amazon EC2, you are given a nice interface where you can select preconfigured plans that may cover most of your use cases.
- You also don’t have to worry about determining the cost since the cost is fixed monthly.
For the purpose of the price calculation, we chose the following plans:
| System | CPU (Cores) | Memory (GB) | SSD Disk (GB) | Transfer limit (TB) | Price/Month |
| Linux | 1 | 2 | 60 | 4 | $10 |
| Linux | 2 | 4 | 80 | 4 | $20 |
And there is 1 month Free Tier
Lightsail uses burstable performance instances that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the additional ability to burst above the baseline.
If you need highly configurable environments and instances with consistently high CPU performance for applications such as video encoding or HPC applications, we recommend you use Amazon EC2.
Amazon Lightsail uses a focused set of features like instances, managed databases and load balancers to make it easier to get started. But that doesn’t mean you’re limited to those options –you can integrate your Lightsail project with some of the 90+ other services in AWS through Amazon VPC peering.
Refer to here for more information about the allowed services.
Batch Jobs
Computerized batch processing is the running of “jobs that can run without end-user interaction, or can be scheduled to run as resources permit.
Google Preemptible VMs
A part of Google compute engine.
Properties:
- Affordable, short-lived compute instances suitable for batch jobs and fault-tolerant workloads.
- Preemptible VMs offer the same machine types and options as regular compute instances and last for up to 24 hours.
- Preemptible VMs are up to 80% cheaper than regular instances.
Limits:
- Compute Engine might terminate preemptible instances at any time due to system events. The probability that Compute Engine will terminate a preemptible instance for a system event is generally low, but might vary from day to day and from zone to zone depending on current conditions.
- Compute Engine always terminates preemptible instances after they run for 24 hours. Certain actions reset this 24-hour counter.
- Preemptible instances are finite Compute Engine resources, so they might not always be available.
Compute Pricing:
For the purpose of the price calculation, we assume choosing one of two instances from the standard machine type. While choosing the region to be Frankfurt.
| Virtual CPUs (count) | Memory (GB) | Price (Hourly) | |
| n1-standard-1 | 1 | 3.75 | $0.0100 |
| n1-standard-2 | 2 | 7.5 | $0.0200 |
Assuming we run the job every hour for 10 minutes every day in the month, the monthly price would be:
For n1-standard-1: $1.2
For n1-standard-2: $2.4
Disk pricing:
| Disk type | Price (GB/month) | Our need | What we will pay |
| Standard provisioned space | $0.040 | 2GB | $0.080 |
System image pricing:
| Image type | Price (GB/month) | Our need | What we will pay |
| Custom Image | $0.102 | 2 GB | $0.204 |
Network pricing:
| Transfer type | Price (per GB) | Our need | What we will pay |
| Egress | $0.12 (for the first TB) | 10 GB | $1.2 |
| Ingress | Free | – | $0.0 |
Total Price:
| VM | Disk | Image | Network | Total Price |
| n1-standard-1 | Standard provisioned 2GB | Custom 2GB | 10 GB out | $1.484 |
| n1-standard-2 | Standard provisioned 2GB | Custom 2GB | 10 GB out | $2.684 |
AWS EC2 Spot Instances
Cloud service providers invest in hardware resources and then release those resources (often on a per-hour basis) to subscribers. One of the problems with this business model, however, is that at any given time, there are likely to be compute resources that are not being utilized. These resources represent hardware capacity that AWS has paid for but are sitting idle, and not making AWS any money at the moment.
Rather than allowing these computing resources to go to waste, AWS offers them at a substantially discounted rate, with the understanding that if someone needs those resources for running a normal EC2 instance, that instance will take priority over spot instances that are using the hardware resources at a discounted rate.
Spot instances are identical to a normal EC2 instance, except for two things:
- First, spot instances use a different billing model than a regular EC2 instance does.
- The other difference is that spot instances are subject to interruption.
Computing price:
For the purpose of the price calculation, we assume choosing one of two instances from the general-purpose machines type. While choosing the region to be Al-Bahrain.
| Instance | vCPU (count) | Memory | Storage | System | Discount | Price/Hour | Frequency of Interruption |
| t3.small | 2 | 2 | EBS Only | Linux | 70% | $0.01756998 | < 5% |
| t3.medium | 2 | 4 | EBS Only | Linux | 70% | $0.03514002 | 10% – 15% |
Assuming we are running the job every hour for 10 minutes every day in the month, the monthly price would be:
For t3.small: $2.1083976
For t3.medium: $4.2168024
Data transfer price:
All data transfer IN to Amazon EC2 from the internet: Free.
Data transferred (IN/OUT) between Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon SES, Amazon SQS, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon ECR, Amazon SNS or Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon EC2 instances in the same AWS Region is free.
Data transfer OUT from Amazon EC2 to the internet:
| Price (per GB) | Our need | What we will pay |
| $0.117 (from over 1 GB to 9.999 TB) | 10 GB | $1.17 |
Disk storage:
For EBS pricing in detail, refer to here.
| Disk type | Price (GB/month) | Our need | What we will pay |
| General-purpose SSD | $0.121 | 2 GB | $0.242 |
Total Price:
| VM | Disk | System | Network | Total Price/month |
| t3.small | General-purpose SSD 2 GB | Linux | 10 GB out | $2.1083976 |
| t3.medium | General-purpose SSD 2 GB | Linux | 10 GB out | $4.2168024 |
AWS Batch Service
AWS Batch plans, schedules, and executes your batch computing workloads across Amazon EC2 and Spot Instances.
There is no additional charge for AWS Batch. You only pay for the AWS resources (e.g. EC2 instances) you create to store and run your batch jobs.
Serverless Functions
Serverless functions are single-purpose, programmatic functions that are hosted on managed infrastructure. These functions, which are invoked through the Internet, are hosted and maintained by cloud computing companies.
Cloud Functions
Google Cloud Functions is a serverless execution environment for building and connecting cloud services. With Cloud Functions, you write simple, single-purpose functions that are attached to events emitted from your cloud infrastructure and services. Your Cloud Function is triggered when an event being watched is fired.
Invocation pricing:
First 2 million are Free
Beyond 2 million $0.40/per million invocations
Assuming we won’t exceed 2 million invocations, we won’t pay for this.
Compute time: pricing
The free tier provides 400,000 GB-seconds, 200,000 GHz-seconds of compute time and 5GB of Internet egress traffic per month.
- GB-Seconds: 1 GB-second is 1 second of wallclock time with 1GB of memory provisioned.
1 GB-second costs $0.0000025 - GHz-Seconds: 1 GHz-second is 1 second of wallclock time with a 1GHz CPU provisioned.
1 GHz-second $0.0000100
For the purpose of price calculation we choose the following:
| Memory | CPU | Price/100ms |
| 1024MB | 1.4 GHz | $0.000001650 |
Assuming we run the function for 14,400 seconds a day, considering the free tier we have monthly:
| GB-seconds | GHz-seconds | Price/month |
| 32,000 => cost: $0.08 | 404,800 => cost: $4.048 | $4.128 |
Networking cost:
Free tier: 5GB Free.
Considering the free tier, we have the following:
| Transfer type | Price (per GB) | Our need | What we will pay |
| Egress | $0.12 (for the first TB) | 10 GB | $0.6 |
| Ingress | Free | – | $0.0 |
Total price:
Total price monthly for Cloud Functions: $4.728
AWS Lambda
It is an event-driven, serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of Amazon Web Services. It is a computing service that runs code in response to events and automatically manages the computing resources required by that code.
Requests price:
Free usage tier includes 1M free requests per month
Beyond 1M requests, you pay $0.25 per 1M requests
Assuming we won’t exceed 1 million requests, we won’t pay for this.
Compute price:
free usage tier includes 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time per month.
Beyond 400,000 GB-seconds you pay $0.000020667 for every GB-second.
Assuming we run the function for 14,400 seconds a day, considering the free tier we have monthly:
| GB-seconds | Price/Month |
| 32,000 => cost: $0.661344 | $0.661344 |
Data transfer price:
All data transfer IN to Amazon EC2 from the internet: Free.
Data transferred (IN/OUT) between Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon SES, Amazon SQS, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon ECR, Amazon SNS or Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon EC2 instances in the same AWS Region is free.
Data transfer OUT from Amazon EC2 to the internet:
| Price (per GB) | Our need | What we will pay |
| $0.117 (from over 1 GB to 9.999 TB) | 10 GB | $1.17 |
Total Price:
Total price monthly for AWS Lambda: $0.661344
Serverless Containers
The term Serverless Containers represents the idea that customers can now run containers without having to manage the actual servers or compute infrastructure that the containers are running on.
GCP Run
A GCP’s service for running stateless containers on a fully managed environment.
Requests pricing:
Free tier: 2 million requests free.
Beyond 2 million requests you pay $0.40 /million requests.
Assuming we won’t exceed 1 million requests, we won’t pay for this.
Compute pricing:
For a given container instance, billable time occurs when
- The container instance is starting
- At least one request is being processed by the container instance
You are billed only for the CPU and memory allocated while a request is active on a container instance, rounded up to the nearest 100 milliseconds.
Cloud Run allocates 1 vCPU per container instance, and this cannot be changed.
Each Cloud Run container instance by default gets 256 MiB of memory. You can change this up to a maximum of 2 GiB.
CPU:
Free tier: First 180,000 vCPU-seconds free
Beyond 180,000 vCPU-seconds you pay $0.00002400 /vCPU-seconds
Memory:
Free trier: First 360,000 GB-seconds free
Beyond 360,000 GB-seconds you pay $0.00000250 / GB-second
Assuming we are consuming 600MB memory for each request, and our request takes 1 second to be handled.
Assuming we run the container on 600 requests every hour a day, each request takes 1s processing time, considering the free tier we have monthly:
| GB-seconds | GHz-seconds | Price/month |
| 252,000 => costs: $6.048 | 0 => costs: $0 | $6.048 |
Total price:
GCP Run total monthly price: $6.048
Conclusion
The following table summarizes your pricing options on AWs and GCP for our assumed context:
- Low computing power.
- 1 second processing time per request.
- 14,400 requests a day.
- runs once each hour (for the offline batch job).
- 600 MB memory.
- 10 GB data transfer out to the internet.
- 2 GB disk.
- 2 GB system image.
| Service Name | Price/Month (USD) | Technology | Properties |
| Compute Engine | $32.754 | Virtual servers | – Real-time response- Always run |
| AWS EC2 on-demand | $18.565 (+ $1.17 if having out AWS data transfer) | Virtual servers | – Real-time response- Always run |
| AWS EC2 Savings Plans | $15.207 (+ $1.17 if having out AWS data transfer) | Virtual servers | – Real-time response- Always run. – Pay for a commitment. |
| Amazon Lightsail | $10 | Virtual servers | – Real-time response- Always run- Limitations on data transfering & not all AWS services can be accessed |
| Google Preemptible VMs | $1.484 | Batch Jobs | – Offline- The instance can be terminated (AWS batch makes it possible to run jobs on a normal EC2 instance that can’t be terminated) – Runs on-demand |
| AWS EC2 Spot Instances | $2.1083976 (+ $1.17 if having out AWS data transfer) | Batch Jobs | – Offline- The instance can be terminated (AWS batch makes it possible to run jobs on a normal EC2 instance that can’t be terminated) – Runs on-demand |
| Cloud Functions | $4.728 | Serverless Functions | – Real-time response- Cold start- Strict limitations on languages, resources, package size, processing time, etc.- Event trigger- Runs on-demand |
| AWS Lambda | $0.661344 (+ $1.17 if having out AWS data transfer) | Serverless Functions | – Real-time response- Cold start- Strict limitations on languages, resources, package size, processing time, etc.- Event trigger- Runs on-demand |
| Cloud Run | $6.048 | Serverless Containers | – Real-time response- Cold start- More freedom than functions- Event trigger- Runs on-demand |
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