Yo! Totally legitimate question, as I don't know the answer to this, and I'm extremely curious: I see a lot of people say that Google is cheaper than Amazon, but I also see a lot of people bemoaning reserved instances and buried in every comment thread about Google vs. Amazon someone points out "wait, this comparison isn't taking into account reserved instances". I thereby don't feel like I actually know which offering is cheaper (though I'm betting it is Google, mostly for the same reasons I don't really want to use their offering, which is maybe unfortunate: that I hate free tiers and artificially low prices, as they either turn into a tax somewhere else or a reason to later scrap a product line). Can you verify that your comparison with 25% cheaper is based on actually paying attention to the pricing structure of the two products? What I'd like to see is "assuming you are going to use a computer for two or three years, and are willing to spend the twenty minutes to save potentially thousands of dollars (as if you aren't, something is wrong with your priorities ;P <- note that I'm willing to admit my priorities are also broken :/...), here is the cost difference between these two offerings".
Until recently, Google Cloud didn't have reserved instances. Interestingly enough, last week they introduced their version of it called "Committed Use" pricing.
Here's what it looks like for 2 CPUs/8GB RAM (numbers below according to their documentation page):
In short. If your infrastructure is so small that it's about reserving 3 instances for a year. You should be running on Digital Ocean. It's much more simple and cheaper. You likely don't need the more advanced features from Google/Amazon.
If your infrastructure is in the hundred of VMs. Reserved instances are basically unusable, it's a NP complete problem to optimize capacity for a moving target. You're as likely to save 10% as to lose 20% on your reservations.
Last but not least. Reserved instances have many tricks and constraints that you'll only find out after you spend 10k on them, and can't go back.
