AWS vs DigitalOcean from UX lens

AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Digital Ocean are both providers of Cloud Infrastructure as a Service. While AWS is certainly miles ahead when it comes to the breadth and depth of cloud offerings, I thought for someone who is just getting started on setting up a cloud, let me try to compare both from UX lens.

At UXHack, we use both AWS and Digital Ocean. Started our journey with AWS but just to ensure we don't have a dependency on only one provider, also explored Digital Ocean.

Today we have our main site running on AWS and our forum and test servers running on Digital Ocean.

From UX standpoint, for me, three most important elements that any cloud provider should focus on:

For the purpose of comparison, I will walk through the journey of setting up a basic building block i.e. a cloud server on a standard l5" laptop screen. Here are the key things to consider when setting up a server:

Basis the above factors, the final price you will pay per month is derived.

With the above background, now let's look at how you can go about configuring the same on AWS and DigitalOcean

In AWS, these cloud servers are generally known as Elastic Compute (EC2) instances; in Digital Ocean, they are known as Droplets.

Here's how the first fold appears on AWS:

And here's how it's laid out in Digital Ocean:

By looking at both the above images, think it's pretty evident that Digital Ocean makes for a meaningful impression right from the first fold.  

Let's move further down now and look at the next folds of AWS:

In the above snapshots, I think there's a lot of unnecessary information like AMI-ID and Network settings which AWS shows upfront. And the information which should be more detailed like monthly pricing is not even shown or can be missed easily because of the smaller font size 🤦‍♂️. Hint: Find '1GB Memory' in above image 

Let's now compare the above with how it's laid out in Digital Ocean:

While the number of folds is certainly more in Digital Ocean, I think, all the requisite information is very well laid out. And perhaps a reason why the screen does not look cramped with text all over unlike in AWS.

- Easy to comprehend different types of instances like Basic, CPU Optimized, Memory Optimized whereas in AWS, the terminology is quite technical t2.micro

- Very easy to compare different price points (monthly) w.r.t hardware and instance type). I still don't understand why AWS leave it to the user to calculate this 🤔

- An important aspect of 'Region'. Digital Ocean has made it a part of the flow, unlike AWS where the region is something you need to select on the top right ('Oregon') in the image

Though as shared first up, AWS is miles ahead when it comes to overall capabilities, and thus sometimes UX takes a back seat. But I am pretty sure, for the capabilities that are matched, I will recommend you to start with Digital Ocean else you might find yourself lost in a maze :)