European alternatives to Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 is AWS’s virtual machine service and the foundation most of the rest of AWS is built on. You choose an instance family tuned to a workload shape — general purpose, compute, memory, storage or GPU — attach EBS volumes, and pay on demand, or commit to Savings Plans and Reserved Instances for large discounts, or bid for spare capacity on the Spot market at a fraction of list.

A virtual machine is commodity; what is not commodity is everything around it. Production EC2 is wired into VPCs and security groups, IAM roles, Auto Scaling groups, Elastic Load Balancers, CloudWatch alarms and AMIs baked by a pipeline, and all of that is AWS-specific. Infrastructure-as-code makes the definitions portable in principle and almost never in practice, because the resource types have no equivalents elsewhere. Data egress is billed per gigabyte, so moving a large dataset out has a price tag of its own.

Amazon EC2 is part of Amazon Web Services, from Amazon.com, Inc. The European alternatives below sell the same core primitive — a virtual machine with block storage and a network — at markedly lower and more predictable prices, with far smaller surrounding service catalogues.