The battle between Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Digital Ocean (DigitalOcean) is a classic example of David versus Goliath.
Newcomer DigitalOcean faces a daunting task when it takes on an industry heavyweight like Amazon Web Services.
As with David’s strategy, DigitalOcean stays out of Amazon’s direct crosshairs.
But this isn’t a deathmatch. This is a contest of wills.
You can make an educated choice between DigitalOcean and Amazon if you are aware of their strengths and weaknesses.
DigitalOcean Overview
One of the most exciting newcomers to the cloud hosting industry is “DigitalOcean,” which was previously known as “Digital Ocean,” a wireless communications equipment manufacturer in the 1990s.
DigitalOcean, in contrast to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which serves everyone, was founded in 2011 and caters solely to developers’ needs.
All five of the company’s data centres are located in the United States.
A great deal of media attention was given to this company in 2013 after Beyonce decided to use their servers to host her debut album.
A lot of VC money flowed into DigitalOcean for a long time because of its rapid expansion.
DigitalOcean’s main selling points are virtual machines that are fast and cheap.
A major part of their business strategy is to provide developers with the ability to quickly and affordably launch Linux instances, which they refer to as “droplets.”.
Ubuntu, CentOS and Debian Linux distributions as well as the popular Ruby on Rails, LAMP, Docker and WordPress can all be launched with a single click of the mouse.
In terms of pricing, DigitalOcean is widely regarded as the best.
Prices are reasonable enough that even small development groups can afford them.
Moreover, they don’t charge you additional fees for things like additional traffic or fixed IP addresses.
They have a simple slider to switch between hourly and monthly pricing options at $0.007/hour or $5 a month.
It’s a big deal to us at DigitalOcean that we only sell high-end equipment.
It takes 55 seconds for droplets to start because of the 1Gbps network and all-solid-state-disk storage (compared to 1-3 minutes for other large cloud providers).
In independent performance tests, DigitalOcean nodes consistently outperform Amazon machines.
As a final benefit, Digital Ocean is extremely user-friendly and simple to set up.
However, only a virtual machine and DNS management services are offered at the moment; this will change in the future.
Load balancing and other features like analytics and configuration management have been added to the product line over time.
If you’re a Linux developer, DigitalOcean isn’t afraid to admit that it’s still a basic IaaS provider for Linux developers.
When it comes to the products and services they provide, it’s as straightforward as this:
Cloud VPS servers and DNS management are included.
It’s done.
“No complicated load balancing systems, hosted databases, Hadoop clusters, or anything else like that are required to run the service.
Don’t make hasty comparisons with Amazon Web Services (AWS), though.”
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Overview
When compared to DigitalOcean, the “Colossus of Cloud Computing,” Amazon is a glaring contrast.
Amazon is a monster truck in a parking lot full of Mini Coopers.
With more computing power than the next ten competitors, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the market leader.
There are a number of different cloud-based infrastructure and platform services offered under the AWS brand, but they are all part of the same service.
The most widely used and well-known IaaS platform is Amazon’s EC2.
Others are:.
Configuration of PaaS in the cloud (Elastic Beanstalk)
A place to keep things (S3 & Glacier products).
a collection of data (RDS, RedShift, SimpleDB, DynamoDB).
Content Delivery and Networking (Route 53, CloudFront).
Configuration and Deployment Management (OpsWorks, CloudFormation).
Delivering the Message (CloudFront).
Balancing the weight.
Platforms for building applications.
Amazon owns the world’s largest data centres.
Separate data centres have been built to meet the needs of the Chinese market.
As a result of the Edward Snowden and Wikileaks revelations, Chinese concerns about US government spying have been heightened (and now legitimated) and these are being kept separate from the others.
In 2013, Amazon was awarded a highly sought-after contract to build a private cloud for the United States government.
Our two-part GuardRail and Amazon AWS EC2 post explains how to get started using the cloud platform.
DigitalOcean’s feature set simply does not match Amazon’s.
However, even in this area, DigitalOcean’s capacity is only about 1% of that of EC2, its main competitor.
More than the smaller players, Amazon is concerned about Google’s AppEngine and Microsoft’s Azure.
Even though DigitalOcean’s prices have dropped, Amazon remains the clear winner in the cloud computing market.
No, it’s in a price war with Google and Microsoft, not DigitalOcean.
This has resulted in 44 price reductions in the last two years alone for cloud service users.
warehousing and storage of data
One of the world’s largest and most comprehensive cloud data center networks is maintained by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
To meet the demands of its global clientele, the cloud provider has expanded into numerous new regions.
These regions and locations are currently supported by Amazon Web Services:
- Asia Pacific: Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo
- Canada: Central
- China: Beijing
- Europe: Frankfurt, Ireland, London
- South America: São Paulo
- US East: N. Virginia, Ohio
- US West: N. California, Oregon
DigitalOcean, on the other hand, despite its smaller footprint, has a global network of data centres.
The following regions are available to select from:
- AMS2, AMS3: Amsterdam, the Netherlands
- BLR1: Bangalore, India
- FRA1: Frankfurt, Germany
- LON1: London, United Kingdom
- TOR1: Toronto, Canada
- NYC1, NYC2, NYC3: New York City, United States
- SFO1, SFO2: San Francisco, United States
- SGP1: Singapore
Because of Chinese regulations, AWS now offers servers in China through its Chinese partners, AWS China (Beijing) and AWS China (Ningxia).
Your choice of service could have a significant impact if your products are intended for the Chinese market.
In terms of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the market leader.
DigitalOcean’s product portfolio is second only to Microsoft Azure’s in terms of breadth, but it has also been quietly expanding its own.
DigitalOcean does not have to provide the full range of AWS services to smaller businesses and developers.
Popular and well-known products from AWS include the following:
- Cloud computing service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) called Amazon EC2.
- Amazon S3 is an object storage and retrieval service.
- AWS Lambda provides a pay-as-you-go option for running serverless applications.
- Amazon Glacier offers low-cost archival storage.
- Push and push-notifications can be delivered to mobile devices via Amazon SNS.
- Amazon Elastic Block Store provides block storage for EC2 servers.
- Real-time streaming big data processing in the cloud via a cloud-based service:
Kinesis by Amazon
- In order to meet their cloud computing needs, customers can use Amazon VPC.
- Amazon SQS (Amazon Simple Queue Service) can be used by microservices and distributed systems to provide distributed message queues.
DigitalOcean may not have as many products as some of its competitors, but this is more than enough for small and medium-sized businesses.
DigitalOcean, on the other hand, has a lot more to offer than AWS.
Among DigitalOcean’s most notable offerings are the following:
- Droplets Service is a fast and flexible cloud computing capacity that provides simple, user-friendly, managed Kubernetes via DigitalOcean.
- Setup, backup, and updating of your databases are all taken care of for you by the DigitalOcean Spaces team for you.
- Droplets DNS, Floating IPs, and Load Balancing in the Cloud: S3-compliant block storage coupled with a CDNVolumes SSD
Despite the expansion of DigitalOcean’s product line, the revenue disparity between AWS and DigitalOcean is an excellent illustration of this.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and DigitalOcean have both passed $250 million in annual revenue as of this writing.
That’s a massive difference in scale.
Cost, Performance Comparisons
As a company whose mission is to simplify cloud computing for small businesses, DigitalOcean’s value proposition aligns with this.
There is an hourly rate for droplets, but the monthly price is simple and predictable, which makes budgeting and planning much more convenient.
All of Amazon Web Services’ more than 160 offerings are purely pay-per-use.
Using AWS for small apps has never been simpler or more predictable thanks to Amazon Lightsail, a service that makes AWS costs more predictable while also saving you money.
The reserved capacity option allows you to save up to 75% on the provisioning costs of your virtual server, as opposed to the pay-as-you-go pricing of an EC2 instance.
DigitalOcean’s Droplet pricing gives you a clear idea of how much it will cost at the start.
Using this as an example, a $25/month Droplet with 1 GB of RAM and a 25 GB SSD costs $5.
It costs $0.007/hr less than the AWS EC2 t2.micro cloud server’s pay-as-you-go cost of $0.0116/hr.
When it comes to cloud computing capacity, DigitalOcean is typically cheaper than its competitors.
In contrast to DigitalOcean, AWS’s pricing has a long history of being opaque and difficult to comprehend.
As a result of this, people who are considering AWS services frequently inquire about pricing.
For small businesses, DigitalOcean is ideal because you know exactly how much you’re going to pay each month.
DigitalOcean beats Amazon Web Services (AWS) on price for the vast majority of their similar offerings.
As a result, it is possible that large enterprises with complex requirements may prefer to stay within the AWS ecosystem rather than rely solely on price.
Because of the complexity of the ecosystem, this is the case for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Apple, PayPal, and DigitalOcean are just a few of the many large corporations that use Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In a well-known performance benchmark study, DigitalOcean came out on top.
Cloud providers were compared in terms of the performance of virtual machines (VMs) on their platforms.
In terms of CPU performance per dollar spent, DigitalOcean beat out Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) by a wide margin.
Scalability and Ease Of Use
In terms of application scalability, DigitalOcean and AWS are very similar.
Both can easily handle billions of incoming requests.
There is a wide range of complementary services available to each platform in the ecosystem, which reflects customers’ differing needs.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a wide range of complementary technologies that allow web applications to handle massive traffic and serve a global audience..
You’ll need a CDN to distribute images and videos as your traffic increases.
AWS offers Amazon CloudFront as a solution for this problem.
There are five read replicas in AWS RDS and fifteen in Amazon Aurora for your database, so which one is better?
Amazon Aurora Serverless offers support for auto-scaling.
An asynchronous message queue may be necessary as the number of requests and database writes grows.
Amazon Simple Queue Service grows with your application.
Your caching requirements can be met by Amazon Elastic Cache.
In order to dynamically increase compute capacity to meet rising demand for your applications on AWS, you can use the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling feature.
It’s just as easy to scale apps hosted on DigitalOcean as it is to scale apps hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
With its focus on simplicity, DigitalOcean allows your in-house devops and development teams to create a system that is tailored to your specific needs.
Dynamically adding Droplets to your application via the API and CLI of DigitalOcean is possible.
A small number of data storage nodes typically supports the front end servers in a typical architecture.
Droplets can be resized using DigitalOcean’s “Resize” feature, but you’ll need to use the DigitalOcean API to truly scale your application.
You can set up rules to automatically create and add nodes to the worker pool of your application when demand is high.
With DigitalOcean’s $10/month load balancers, you can ensure that your services remain online even in the face of high demand.
There is also the option of using a Droplet backup, but this incurs an additional fee of 20% of the Droplet cost.
Making your Pick
Choosing between DigitalOcean and AWS should be straightforward if you know for whom each company’s platform has been optimised.
DigitalOcean can work for you even if you’re a large corporation looking for everything in one place.
However, because you aren’t their ideal target customer, you’ll have a much more difficult time.
DigitalOcean.
As a small startup looking for a simple solution, AWS is just not optimised for you because it is designed to handle the cloud computing needs of large enterprises with all of the complexity that comes along, making it unsuitable for you..
With at least 36 availability zones and more than 50 edge locations around the world, AWS has a significant advantage in terms of cloud computing market dominance.
As a market leader, AWS is able to deliver cutting-edge innovations to customers before the rest of the market does.
A high level of general complexity and costs, on the other hand, make it difficult for platform users to comprehend and plan for.
It’s a more agile and lean platform, but DigitalOcean places a greater emphasis on the ease of use for the end user.
Because of the product’s simple user interface and low level of complexity, even small devops teams with limited resources can now manage their infrastructure to the same high standard as any large company.
DigitalOcean does not have a wide range of products that can meet the needs of large enterprises.
Consequently, when it comes to large cloud customers, DigitalOcean is unable to compete against Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
Summary
DigitalOcean does not compete directly with Amazon.
A high-performance instance can be up and running in just a few minutes for small developers and businesses.
In terms of virtual machine performance, Amazon is losing to the tenacious challenger.
With fewer features and deployments that can be completed with a single click, DigitalOcean is perfect for those just getting started with cloud computing.
Cloud services can be found in Amazon’s “cloud supermarket,” which includes everything from mobile analytics and cloud workflows to nearly any cloud service you can imagine.
