36-Way Comparison Of Amazon EC2 / Google Compute Engine / Microsoft Azure Cloud Instances vs. Intel/AMD CPUs

Earlier this week I delivered a number of benchmarks comparing Amazon EC2 instances to bare metal Intel/AMD systems. Due to interest from that, here is a larger selection of cloud instance types from the leading public clouds of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.

These tests are intended as some reference benchmarks in showing some general performance metrics for these different public cloud instance types compared to different "bare metal" reference systems. All of the cloud instances were using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with all available system updates as of this week. Compared to the earlier article this week, the number of raw Intel/AMD CPU systems were reduced given the number of cloud configurations tested.

A wide variety of the Amazon/Microsoft/Google cloud instances were tested while focusing on the general instance types or the CPU performance but generally not focusing upon the memory or GPU instance types for this article given the focus of these benchmarks used. The Google Compute Engine benchmarks are a bit light this time around due to some obstacles in the higher core count instances.

The different cloud instances came down to:

While the overall cloud/CPU comparison came down to:

- Ryzen 3 1200
- Ryzen 3 1300X
- Ryzen 3 2200G
- Ryzen 5 2400G
- Ryzen 7 1700
- Ryzen 7 1800X
- Threadripper 1950X
- EPYC 7601
- Core i3 8100
- Core i5 8400
- Core i7 7740X
- Core i7 8700K
- Core i9 7980XE
- Xeon Silver 4108
- 2 x Xeon Gold 6138
- EC2 c4.8xlarge
- EC2 c5.9xlarge
- EC2 c5.18xlarge
- EC2 m5.4xlarge
- EC2 m5.12xlarge
- EC2 m4.10xlarge
- EC2 m4.16xlarge
- EC2 m5.large
- EC2 t2.2xlarge
- Google n1-highcpu-8
- Google n1-highcpu-16
- Google n1-standard-8
- Google n1-standard-16
- Microsoft Azure D4s v3
- Microsoft Azure D8s v3
- Microsoft Azure D16s v3
- Microsoft Azure D32s v3
- Microsoft Azure D64s v3
- Microsoft Azure E4s v3
- Microsoft Azure E32s v3
- Microsoft Azure F8s v2

The testing on each configuration was basically done "out of the box" unless otherwise stated. All of these public cloud compute benchmarks and raw Linux CPU benchmarks were conducted in a fully-automated and reprodubie way using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.