Amazon Web Services Alternatives with focus on Compute & AI in '24

Over the past twelve months, the cloud market has grown to represent a $247 billion opportunity. Amazon Web Services (AWS) stands as the market leader.¹  Since its foundation, AWS has led the shift in the enterprise ecosystem from on-premise infrastructures to cloud-based solutions. 

While AWS is a dominant vendor in the cloud computing arena, factors such as costs, deep learning and compute capabilities or specific service requirements can lead businesses to search for alternatives. In this article, we will provide detailed information on these alternatives and the factors that may influence your decision-making process.

AWS and top 5 competitors

Vendors are sorted out according to alphabetical order. Only representative services are provided in the AI & Machine learning and developer options sections in the table.

For some other common solutions, check:

• Cloud GPUs for Deep Learning: Availability& Price / Performance
• Top Cloud Collaboration Tools of 2024
• Cloud GPU Platforms
• Cloud H100 providers
• Cloud A100 providers

4 AWS alternatives in LLM hosting

This table shows popular alternatives to AWS in LLM hosting and their pricing options. It is also worth mentioning notable competitors such as Google (offering various products) and Microsoft (such as AutoGen).

*OpenAI has a wide price scale.²

**Hugging Face offers various price options for different services.³

***Cohere offers different prices for 6 different plans.⁴ 

5 AWS Alternatives in AI image generation

Vendors are sorted according to alphabetical order.

5 AWS alternatives in computer vision

Vendors are sorted according to the number of reviews they got from major review platforms such as G2, Capterra⁵  , and Trustradius.

AWS overview

AWS’s unique role in the market is underscored by its comprehensive suite of 200+ fully-featured services from data centers globally. It supports different scale of businesses, including large enterprises, emerging startups, and public sector organizations, with a strong commitment to security and compliance.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a dominant force in the world of cloud computing, It offers a wide array of services that meet diverse needs in areas such as computing. Here, give a glance at some of the significant products of AWS in CPU-bound compute, GPU-bound compute, data management, AI & deep learning.

CPU-bound compute services:

AWS offers 20+ products just in computing. Yet, it is possible to divide them according to use areas. In CPU-bound computing, 2 products step further:

Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud): A central piece of AWS’s cloud computing platform, EC2, through a web interface, offers resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It’s designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. The product allows users to choose among 10 instance types (on-demand, c7g and more), operating systems, and software packages. EC2 offers 2 services in itself:

• Auto scaling: Allows you to maintain application availability and automatically add or remove instances on will. You can also reach fleet management capabilities offered by Amazon through auto scaling.
• Image builder: Streamlines the process of creating, testing, and deploying VM and container images.

AWS Lambda: Lambda is AWS’s event-driven, serverless computing platform. It runs code in response to events and automatically manages the computing resources required by that code. This service stands out for its ability to offer cloud management without the need for server provisioning. Lambda can allocate CPU power in proportion to the amount of memory needed.

GPU-bound compute services:

For tasks requiring high-performance graphics and computing power, AWS offers:

Amazon EC2 P3 instances: These instances are designed for GPU-based workloads and are ideal for machine learning, high-performance computing, and 3D visualizations. They are significant for their high-performance NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.

Amazon Elastic Graphics. Elastic graphics allows users to attach low-cost graphics acceleration to a wide range of EC2 instances.

Data management services:

In the realm of data handling and storage, AWS offers:

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service): A scalable, high-speed, web-based cloud storage service designed for online backup and archiving of data and application programs. S3 stands out for its durability, availability, and scalability, distinguishing AWS in the cloud services market.

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service): This service makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. It provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity while managing time-consuming database administration tasks.

AI & deep learning services:

AWS offers 13+ services in AI and deep learning. 2 of them are:

Amazon SageMaker: SageMaker is a fully managed product that provides developers and data scientists the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models. (Figure 1) It integrates with the most common ML frameworks, toolkits, and programming languages. According to AWS, SageMaker gets 1.5 trillion+ inference requests per month.⁶

AWS DeepLens: DeepLense engages in computer vision projects and tutorials, and through a tangible device. Product allows you to execute deep learning models directly on the camera, enabling it to process and respond to its visual inputs (Figure 2).⁷Through the management console, users can send ML models built in SageMaker to DeepLens.

AWS pricing 

AWS products are very diverse and there are services within the products themselves. For this reason, in this table we have only included the products mentioned in this article. 

*Lambda offers 6 different plans.⁸

**AWS Elastic Graphics offers different prices in 7 different regions.⁹

***AWS S3 offers different prices in 31 different regions.¹⁰ 

****AWS SageMaker offers 4 different plans for 18 services.¹¹

AWS leads the market

AWS’s leadership in the cloud environment can be not limited to but attributed to several factors:

Service range: AWS offers an extensive range of cloud services that cover virtually every aspect of cloud computing needs, from basic cloud storage and networking to complex machine learning and AI services.

Scalability and flexibility: AWS provides scalable cloud computing solutions that can grow with the needs of a business. Its flexible pricing models can also make it a popular option.

Global reach: AWS has a vast global network of data centers, which ensures low latency and high performance for its cloud services worldwide.

Ecosystem and community: AWS has a large and active community of developers, partners, and customers, contributing to a rich ecosystem of support, tools, and resources.

Key things to consider while choosing an AWS alternative

Price: Compare the cost-effectiveness of different services.

Data sovereignty: Understand data storage locations and compliance with local regulations.

Avoiding proprietary services: Choose services that won’t lock you into a specific vendor, facilitating easier transitions in the future.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Assess the flexibility and scalability of the IaaS offerings.

External Links

• 1. “Chart: Amazon Maintains Lead in the Cloud Market | Statista.” Statista. Retrieved on December 25, 2023. 
• 2. “Pricing” OpenAI. Retrieved on December 25, 2023. 
• 3. “Hugging Face – Pricing” HuggingFace. Retrieved on December 25, 2023. 
• 4. “Pricing – Affordable NLP & Language Model Solutions | Cohere” Cohere. Retrieved on December 25, 2023. 
• 5. “Capterra”. Retrieved on December 25, 2023. 
• 6. “Amazon SageMaker”. Retrieved on December 25, 2023. 
• 7. “How AWS DeepLens Works” AWS. Retrieved on December 25, 2023. 
• 8. “AWS Lambda Pricing”. Retrieved on December 25, 2023. 
• 9. “Amazon Elastic Graphics – Pricing”. Retrieved on December 25, 2023. 
• 10. “Amazon S3 Simple Storage Service Pricing” Retrieved on December 25, 2023. 
• 11. “Machine Learning Service – Amazon SageMaker Pricing” Retrieved on December 25, 2023.