Microsoft vs Amazon: Virtual servers game intensifies

Last week, Microsoft introduced its G series which it claimed are the “largest amount of local SSD of any virtual machine size currently available in the public cloud.” Just a week after, Amazon has brought its new ‘larger’ C4 series instances.

Last year, at its developer conference, Amazon said it would soon launch its fastest EC2 instances yet. Starting January 12, developers can spin up these new C4 series instances to power their highly compute-intensive apps in Amazon’s cloud.

“These new C4 instances are designed for compute-bound workloads, such as high-traffic front-end fleets, MMO gaming, media processing, transcoding, and High Performance Computing (HPC) applications," Amazon said in a blogpost .

Both Amazon C4s and Microsoft’s G series virtual machines are based on Intel Xeon processor E5 v3 family, known as ‘Haswell’.

G-series offers up to 32 virtual CPUs using the latest Intel Xeon processor E5 v3 family, 448GB of memory, and 6.59 TB of local Solid State Drive (SSD) space. This large amount of memory will enable much faster deployments of mission critical applications such as large relational database servers like SQL Server and MySQL and large NoSQL and BigData solutions like MongoDB, Cassandra, Cloudera, xTremeData, and DataStax. These new sizes also increase the maximum count of attached data disks to 64, enabling the attachment of up to 64 TBs of persistent disks in Azure Storage.

Microsoft’s largest G5 comes with 32 virtual CPUs and a massive 448 GB of memory, costing $9.65 per hour. The G1 with two cores and 28 GB of RAM is priced at $0.67 per hour, the G2 costs $1.34 per hour; the G3 $2.68 per hour; and the G4 $5.36 per hour.

C4 instances are available in five sizes, offering up to 36 vCPUs. C4 instances are based on Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (codename Haswell) processors that run at a base frequency of 2.9 GHz, and can deliver clock speeds as high as 3.5 GHz with Intel Turbo Boost. Each C4 instance type is EBS-optimised by default and at no additional cost. This feature provides 500 Mbps to 4,000 Mbps of dedicated throughput to EBS above and beyond the general purpose network throughput provided to the instance. C4 instances also provide Enhanced Networking for higher packet per second (PPS) performance, lower network jitter, and lower network latencies.

However, Amazon scores more points as it uses Haswell E5-2666 chip customised by Intel for its EC2 servers .

While Amazon is focusing on compute-intensive applications, Microsoft aims at broader use cases including database servers.