Differences between VPS and Cloud

Real comparison between VPS and Cloud

Yann / hace 2 años

It is often thought that a Cloud server and a VPS are basically the same since they both have the same objectives: to build a virtual machine.

VPS

VPS or Private Server is a virtual machine that uses KVM or LXC virtualization technologies, including OpenVZ, Linux VServer, or FreeBSD Jail. Basically they are divisions of servers, which allow obtaining qualities of a server, having exclusive and secure access to your data.

Cloud

The Cloud service, which other companies tend to misuse in Chile, is an abstraction service based on physical hardware running through a public cloud and a private cloud, distributing the service over a network of nodes that allow reaching different (no larger ) stability levels

Costs

While operating costs are fixed in a VPS , in a Cloud they are usually variable costs depending on data consumption. Apparently it is more convenient to pay for what you consume , but the ratio to pay will always be higher compared to a traditional VPS since the abstraction service is more expensive and the prices can be easily managed . In my experience, projects that can be hosted in a VPS of $ 50,000 CLP, in a Cloud service you can pay around $ 250,000.

Without considering that through a national service you can recover VAT as it is billable as a product in the first case.

About fault tolerance

It is often stated that Cloud servers are fault tolerant and a VPS is not. In itself, considering that a Cloud service is fault tolerant, it is argued under the premise that being abstracted, if a server falls, the Cloud would tend to use other nodes and bypass the problem, which is not entirely true. For example, a company as trustworthy as Apple had on May 20, 2015, a seven-hour outage in Apple iCloud that affected email and other cloud services, such as iCloud Drive, Documents, etc.

Within the whole range of problems that a system could have, the greatest number of problems are not associated with the hardware itself, which is not exclusive, but with the misuse of the software, maintenance and updates. Our servers have RAID (A redundant group /array of independent disks) which provides greater data security, maintaining a backup that allows facing types of problems associated with the hardware.

Virtualization

To make this article I have searched a lot of information and between differences and similarities, it seems that everyone concludes that a Cloud PRO is virtualization in KVM which improves physical behavior and does not share the loads that could affect the performance of your application because of the fault of the neighbors . To tell the truth, in both services , both VPS ssd and Cloud it is possible to virtualize in KVM in order to work under stable parameters of resource availability.

It is also stated that VPS cannot have SWAP which is not true. Both LXC and KVM virtualizations can have SWAP memory that takes the load off the RAM, obviously depending on the company that provides them, in our case YES.

Safety

In itself, be it Cloud or VPS, security is not an absolute criterion and it will always be determined by the use that is given to it, from how the Firewall is raised to infrastructure issues. The generality is that Cloud services, being distributed over a network, by probability increases the vulnerability to being attacked.

The ideal is to know references that allow you to make a wise decision regarding security policies and policies against contingencies with each hosting provider, vps or server.

Response times

Being a distributed network, response times are slower since there are more variables at stake, such as internet speed and the latencies of sending and receiving packets between servers.

In this post I do not intend to make an apology to the VPS service, since the progress in business processes that Cloud services have allowed is undoubted, but when looking for information that allows to account for the current scenario and make an impartial comparison, the bias is evident caused by ignorance of a more complex technology.

Both services have pros and cons that I would be interested in further exploring further.