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Amazon Web Services vs DigitalOcean: cloud comparison
Updated: · Comparison generated from structured data
Direct answer
Choosing between Amazon Web Services and DigitalOcean depends first on location, required services and GPU access. 5 documented capabilities are only available on Amazon Web Services and 0 only on DigitalOcean. Measured performance is covered on the benchmark pages.
Executive summary
Amazon Web Services and DigitalOcean document 25 and 20 of the same 26 criteria respectively, with 20 capabilities in common. Amazon Web Services bills per-second and DigitalOcean bills per-second. Amazon Web Services has a Local Zone in Türkiye; DigitalOcean has no infrastructure in Türkiye. Amazon Web Services offers H100, H200, L40S; DigitalOcean offers H100, H200, L40S.
Key findings
- 01 Capabilities documented only by Amazon Web Services: Dedicated / single-tenant resources, Virtual router with NAT, Control-plane audit logging, User identity attribution in audit events, Infrastructure located in Türkiye.
- 02 Capabilities documented only by DigitalOcean: none.
Overview
| Amazon Web Services | DigitalOcean | |
|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | Seattle, United States | New York, United States |
| Operator | Amazon Web Services, Inc. | DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. |
| Regions | Global regions; in Türkiye an Istanbul Local Zone (GA May 2026) with a subset of services, parented to Europe (Frankfurt). | Regions in North America, Europe (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London), Asia and Australia; none in Türkiye. |
| Billing model | Per second — On-demand Linux EC2 instances are billed per second with a 60-second minimum; other operating systems and services have their own meters. | Per second — GPU Droplets are billed per second with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher; powered-off GPU Droplets continue to bill until destroyed. |
| Documented capabilities | 25 / 26 | 20 / 26 |
| Technologies | Nitro System, S3 API, CloudFormation, Terraform | Kubernetes (DOKS), S3 API (Spaces), Terraform |
Availability and regions
Amazon Web Services
- Europe (Frankfurt) eu-central-1 Generally available
- Istanbul Local Zone istanbul-local-zone Generally available
DigitalOcean
- Frankfurt fra1 Generally available
- Amsterdam ams3 Generally available
- London lon1 Generally available
Features
| Criterion | AWS | DigitalOcean |
|---|---|---|
| Data residency | ||
| Infrastructure located in Türkiye Generally available compute and storage capacity physically located in Türkiye (full region or local zone). | Yes Istanbul Local Zone with a subset of services (GA May 2026); not a full region. | No |
| Compute & GPU | ||
| Virtual machine instances Self-service virtual machines with selectable CPU/RAM profiles. | Yes | Yes |
| Per-second or per-minute billing Standard compute billed at per-second or per-minute granularity rather than per started hour. | Yes Per-second for Linux on-demand (60 s minimum). | Yes Per-second (60 s / $0.01 minimum). |
| Dedicated / single-tenant resources Dedicated hosts, bare metal or organisation-dedicated cloud capacity. | Yes Dedicated Hosts and bare-metal instances. | Partial Dedicated CPU Droplets; no single-tenant hosts. |
| NVIDIA H100 instances On-demand or reservable instances with NVIDIA H100 GPUs. | Yes | Yes |
| NVIDIA H200 instances On-demand or reservable instances with NVIDIA H200 GPUs. | Yes | Yes |
| NVIDIA L40S instances On-demand or reservable instances with NVIDIA L40S GPUs. | Yes | Yes |
| Platform & automation | ||
| API and Terraform automation Documented API plus an available Terraform provider for infrastructure as code. | Yes | Yes |
| Open-source cloud stack (OpenStack-based) The provider publicly states that its IaaS control plane is built on OpenStack or an equivalent open-source stack. | No | No |
| Kubernetes | ||
| Managed Kubernetes Provider-operated Kubernetes control plane. | Yes | Yes |
| Kubernetes node autoscaling Worker node count scales automatically within configured limits. | Yes | Yes |
| Kubernetes LoadBalancer integration Services of type LoadBalancer provision a provider load balancer automatically. | Yes | Yes |
| Kubernetes storage classes (CSI) Persistent volumes provisioned dynamically through a provider storage class. | Yes | Yes |
| Storage & data | ||
| Block storage volumes Persistent, attachable and expandable block volumes. | Yes | Yes |
| Volume snapshots Point-in-time snapshots of block volumes. | Yes | Yes |
| S3-compatible object storage Object storage reachable through the S3 API or an S3-compatible API. | Yes Native S3. | Yes Spaces. |
| Managed backup service Scheduled backup and restore for instances or volumes managed by the provider. | Yes | Yes |
| Managed database Provider-operated relational database service. | Yes | Yes |
| Networking | ||
| L4 load balancer (TCP/UDP) Transport-layer load balancing. | Yes | Yes |
| L7 load balancer (HTTP/HTTPS) Application-layer load balancing with HTTP health checks. | Yes | Yes |
| Reassignable static public IP Static public addresses that can be moved between resources (Floating/Reserved/Elastic IP). | Yes Elastic IP addresses. | Yes Reserved IPs. |
| Private networks / VPC Isolated tenant networks with custom CIDR ranges. | Yes | Yes |
| Virtual router with NAT Managed router or NAT gateway for egress and inter-subnet routing, including static routes. | Yes Route tables and NAT Gateway. | Unverified |
| Security groups / cloud firewall Stateful, API-managed network access rules. | Yes | Yes Cloud Firewalls. |
| Security & auditing | ||
| Control-plane audit logging A provider service that records management (API/console) operations against cloud resources. | Yes AWS CloudTrail. | Unverified |
| User identity attribution in audit events Each audit event identifies the authenticated principal that performed the operation. | Yes | Unverified |
Pricing and GPUs
| Provider | NVIDIA H100 | NVIDIA H200 | NVIDIA L40S | Türkiye infrastructure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | Generally available EC2 P5 Single-GPU p5.4xlarge and 8-GPU p5.48xlarge sizes; availability varies by region. | Generally available EC2 P5e / P5en 8-GPU instances; availability varies by region. | Generally available EC2 G6e 1 to 8 L40S GPUs per instance. | Yes |
| DigitalOcean | Generally available GPU Droplet — NVIDIA HGX H100 $4.410 / GPU-h 1× or 8× H100 80 GB; 1× plan with 20 vCPU and 240 GiB RAM. | Generally available GPU Droplet — NVIDIA HGX H200 $4.470 / GPU-h 1× or 8× H200 141 GB; 1× plan with 24 vCPU and 240 GiB RAM. | Generally available GPU Droplet — NVIDIA L40S $1.570 / GPU-h 1× L40S 48 GB with 8 vCPU and 64 GiB RAM. | No |
Prices are shown in the currency each provider publishes; no exchange-rate conversion is applied.
Benchmarks
Sources
- [1] Now Open — AWS Local Zones in Istanbul, Türkiye — AWS Official documentation accessed:
- [2] Introducing three new NVIDIA GPU-based Amazon EC2 instances (P5e, G6, G6e) — AWS Official documentation accessed:
- [3] Amazon EC2 On-Demand Pricing — AWS Official documentation accessed:
- [4] AWS CloudTrail User Guide — AWS Official documentation accessed:
- [5] Droplet Pricing (DigitalOcean Documentation) — DigitalOcean Official documentation accessed:
- [6] GPU Droplets Pricing — DigitalOcean Official documentation accessed:
- [7] Regional availability — DigitalOcean Official documentation accessed:
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