Bigstep vs AWS

Bigstep Metal Cloud vs AWS

AWS warrants no introduction. The question we always get when we talk about our services is why should someone go with Bigstep rather than AWS? The answer is typically "it depends". The Metal Cloud is not for everyone and everything. It has some specific use cases where we shine and others where we don't. We've put together a side-by-side comparison to make it easy to make a decision.

	Bigstep Metal Cloud	AWS
Bare metal	Yes	no (with the exception of a few very large machines such as i3.metal which has 72 cores and 512 GB of RAM)
Minimum instance size	8 cores 32 GB RAM	1 core 0.5 GB RAM
Self Service	Yes	Yes
Provisioning time	300 seconds	100-300 seconds
OS volume	iscsi	via virtual block device
Additional storage volumes	iscsi block devices	EBS via virtual block device
On-demand	Yes (per second)	Yes (per second)
Migration-less upgrade support	Yes (with restart)	Yes (instance resizing, with some restrictions)
Stop and resume support	Yes	Yes
Service network config.	Yes (L2 & L3)	Yes (L3 only)
L2 technology	MPLS	N/A
Private LAN support	Yes	Yes (VPC)
API enabled	Yes	Yes
IPV6	Yes	Yes (only as HTTP(S), SSl termination)
BGP support	Yes (custom)	Yes (native)
Shared filesystem support	Yes (via GFS - Bigstep SharedDrive)	Yes (via NFSv4 - AWS EFS)
Database as a Service	Couchbase, Cassandra, Exasol, PostgreSQL, MySQL (Percona), Elasticsearch	RDS, Redshift, Aurora, DynamoDB, Timestream, Neptune
Hadoop & Spark as a Service	Cloudera, MapR, Hortonworks, Mesos	EMR
Data Science Tools	Jupyter	SageMaker
Native container platform	Yes (Bigstep Container Platform)	Yes (AWS EKS)
Container Apps	Apache Spark, Streamsets, Apache Kafka, Zoomdata, Jupyter	No
Object Storage	Yes (Bigstep DataLake service)	Yes (S3)
Serverless services	No	Amazon Lambda, Step Function, Glue etc.
Other services	No	Many

Why choose Bigstep?

Single tenant, bare metal instances
at no extra cost

There is very little you cannot do with AWS. Our primary advantage comes from the performance and stability improvement that bare metal brings to the table. You can get single tenant servers in AWS but at a premium price and you will still have the virtualization layer.

2x the compute performance

The typical performance improvement you should expect is 2x but it depends on the kind of workload you have. A customer found 20x improvement for deep learning model training.

6x faster network

The network latency is 6x lower in Bigstep than in AWS so microservices on Kubernetes will run faster in Bigstep than AWS. See this benchmark.

No lock-in with
Databases as a Service

There is also a lot less lock-in with Bigstep. All of the additional services we offer such as Databases as a Service are standard off-the-shelf technologies that you can deploy anywhere.

Why choose AWS?

Serverless services

We would highlight the serverless services. With AWS Lambda you can breakdown an app and run it's functions independently in an autoscalable environment. This eliminates the need for infrastructure management and OS management and offers a truly no-ops experience to developers.