Cloud platforms are exciting to me because it seems every new feature presents an opportunity to break out a spreadsheet to figure out performance/$.<p>I'm going to consider 3 cases:<p>CDN: 1TB of storage, 1000 IOPS required. (a cache or "smart"/ACLed CDN)<p>DB: 20GB of storage, 5000 IOPS required. (a moderately sized database)<p>Hybrid: 500GB of storage, 2500 IOPS required. (some composite of the two)<p>A summary of pricing right now for storage IOPS:<p><pre><code> (US East)
$/GB $/IOPS CDN DB Hybrid
Google Cloud Platform 0.325 $0.011 $ 325 $ 54 $ 163
Amazon EC2/EBS 0.125 $0.100 $ 225 $ 502 $ 313
Microsoft Azure 0.050 n/a $ 50 $ 1 $ 25
Microsoft Azure (w/vm) 0.050 n/a $ 85 $ 278 $ 164
</code></pre>
Here's how they are currently priced:<p>Google: pay for the GB, get a fixed IOPS/GB.<p>Amazon: pay for the GB, pay for the IOPS.<p>Microsoft: pay for the GB, get 500 IOPS/<i>disk</i>, with a maximum of 16 disks. (but you can't attach that many disks unless you pay for a larger instance size, too)<p>Microsoft (w/VM): I've included the cost of the compute instance in this summary. I used an A1 VM for CDN, A4 for DB, and A3 for Hybrid, at $35, $277, and $139 monthly, respectively.<p><i>CDN</i><p>Google: $325 for 1TB/30,000 IOPS.<p>Amazon: $225 for precisely 1TB/1,000 IOPS.<p>Microsoft: $50 (using 2 500GB disks)<p>Microsoft (w/vm): $85 (an A1 VM is required to use two disks)<p><i>DB</i><p>Google: $54 for 167GB/5,000 IOPS.<p>Amazon: $502 for 20GB/5,000 IOPS.<p>Microsoft: $1 for 20GB/5,000 IOPS (using 10 2GB disks)<p>Microsoft (w/vm): $278 (an A4 VM is required to use 9-16 disks)<p><i>Hybrid</i><p>Google: $162.50 for 500GB/15,000 IOPS.<p>Amazon: $312.50 for 500GB/2,500 IOPS.<p>Microsoft: $25 for 500GB/2500 IOPS (using 5 100 GB disks).<p>Microsoft (w/vm): $164 (an A3 VM is required to use 5-8 disks)<p>EDIT: I forgot to add a disclaimer. I am a student at the University of Northern Iowa. I am not affiliated with Amazon or Google. I am a Microsoft Partner, however. I was not paid or asked to write this post, and have never been directly paid by Microsoft to produce any writing, benchmark, or whatever, etc, etc. IANAL, etc. I have received standard gifts from them from attending conferences.