AWS alternative for local cloud hosting

by Yulia Shevchenko

The old approach to web development and hosting have to be reconsidered. Using the expensive old systems requires a DevOps team for management: developers for running applications, sysadmins for configuring servers, QA engineers for checking and tracking the system, and so on.
Cloud hosting providers declare that it is possible to simplify those development and management tasks running projects in the cloud.
Among the most popular providers nowadays can be mentioned such giants as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Heroku and others. But does size and popularity always mean the best quality?
Let’s check it within our comparative article showing the difference between AWS and local cloud hosting provider Cloudlets Australia that is powered by Jelastic PaaS.  Cloudlets is an Australian home of Jelastic technology that provides auto scalable cloud across a local highly available data center, with a local support.

Users Interface

AWS dashboard can be hardly named intuitive and easy to use, especially when you see it for the first time - lots of lists and layers might make developers think that running projects at UI based cloud platforms seems a rather complicated task.

Jelastic UI lets you create, deploy, manage, and scale projects easily, without a necessity to perform any complex configurations and dive into sub layers, all within intuitive dashboard.

Scaling & Billing

AWS makes you pay for the entire tier even if you are not using it. Everytime your project grows, - you have to upgrade to a twice bigger package. And pay twice.

With Cloudlets you can set a low reserved cloudlet amount and make the rest dynamic, paying for those dynamic cloudlets when they are in use.

In the table below the number of 'Cloudlets Required' are calculated so the RAM is the same between each AWS tier and the cloudlets. The 'Cloudlets Monthly Estimate' is based on:

  • 50% resource usage as set rate (reserved cloudlets) across a given month
  • Resource usage above 50%-75% for 30% of a given month (allocated to dynamic cloudlets)
  • Resource usage between 75%-100% for 10% of a given month (also dynamic cloudlets)
  • All prices are in AUD (AWS prices taken 6th Sept 2019)

*The Baseline Mhz AWS column does not take into account the convoluted CPU credit system AWS offers.

“From price prospective, we felt all benefits of Jelastic “pay-per-use” billing model in combination with automatic vertical scaling, hibernation of inactive workloads and running applications in containers on bare metal. With AWS the infrastructure cost was about 1,200 euros/month per each project as we had to buy large VMs to cover expected load spikes but kept them underutilized most of the time. After migration to Jelastic, my clients can launch the needed Magento-based project with about 80 euros/month. The price increases temporary only during load growth when more resources are actually consumed, and it is performed automatically with no need to right-size servers or restart containers,” - from a Simone Chinaglia feedback about moving from AWS to Jelastic.

VMs vs Containers

In AWS, templates are provisioned inside virtual machines, that makes users pay for limits and not for the real usage.

In Cloudlets, infrastructure is container-based, so that you can set a low reserved cloudlet amount and make the rest dynamic, paying only for those dynamic cloudlets when they are in use.

Marketplace

Amazon Web Services marketplace is called EC2 and features a selection of third-party applications - to install the WordPress package, you need to first reserve a server instance. And the size of the server instance determines a fixed price for the site. The users interface provides a huge range of functions, and a ready-made package installation still requires a lot of manual configuring.

Jelastic Marketplace provides prepackaged templates of standalone and clustered WordPress, Magento, MySQL, PostgreSQL, NGINX, Tomcat, GlassFish, WildFly, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes +++ other solutions and add-ons ready to be installed in 1 click. These highly-available solutions are automatically deployed, scaled and replicated, requiring minimal efforts for support and management.

Conclusion

The core difference between AWS and Jelastic is that Amazon provides different solutions for different teams - AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS OpsWorks, Amazon ECS, and you have to pay and get expertise for all these solutions separately. To run your projects at AWS you have to onvolve an OPS in order to manage the infrastructure and get all the services work properly. Besides, it is complicated to scale.
Jelastic platform provides a ready-to-go solution that is universal and can be simultaneously used by DevOps and testing teams within a single platform without a necessity to upgrade licences or buy additional certificates.

Jelastic provides cloud hosting via hosting providers around the globe, supplying the robust technology on top of the local hoster, with local data center and local support. The platform is easy to use, easy to scale, and cost-effective. Together with flexibility, performance, stability, support of all the latest stacks it becomes the valid alternative to VM-based competitors.