AWS vs Yandex Cloud

What AWS is

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world's most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platform. Offering over 200 fully featured services, it helps startups move faster while lowering costs for giant government agencies. From databases to machine learning and IoT, it provides everything a digital infrastructure needs in seconds. AWS is the backbone of the internet; the world's largest companies like Netflix and Airbnb live on this secure and scalable infrastructure.

What Yandex Cloud is

Yandex Cloud is a proprietary cloud platform with Compute Cloud virtual machines and more than 50 infrastructure, data, container, serverless and ML services. Billing and signup depend on payer type, country and contracting entity. New business customers can receive a limited trial; new individuals start on consumption billing, while a separate initial grant requires a linked card and has exclusions. VM compute is billed per second while running, but disks, snapshots, images, public IPs, licenses and outbound traffic are separate and may continue after a VM stops or is deleted.

What AWS is built to do

Amazon EC2

Rent flexible and scalable virtual servers in the cloud.

AWS Lambda

A serverless architecture that runs your code only when triggered.

Amazon S3

The most secure object storage service for any type of data on the web.

Amazon SageMaker

Build, train, and deploy machine learning models at high speed.

What Yandex Cloud is built to do

Compute Cloud

Runs virtual machines, preemptible capacity and fault-tolerant instance groups.

Persistent storage

Uses zonally replicated disks plus separately billed snapshots and images.

Organization and IAM

Structures organizations, clouds and folders with role-based service access.

Billing controls

Tracks detailed usage, grants, budgets, notifications and commitment discounts.

Choose AWS if

• Cloud Engineers, Large Enterprises, and Scalable Startups.

Choose Yandex Cloud if

• Workloads targeting Russia or supported surrounding markets after legal and residency review
• Teams needing Yandex-native data, analytics or ML services alongside infrastructure
• Businesses approved for trial or program credits with a plan for post-credit operating cost

Skip Yandex Cloud if

• The payer country or required payment method is unsupported
• The project assumes every new account receives the advertised maximum trial credit
• Disks, snapshots, IPs, marketplace licenses, egress and recovery are absent from the cost model

AWS: pros & cons

• Infinite Scalability: Your systems grow automatically as your traffic increases.
• Global Infrastructure: Low-latency data centers available in every major global region.
• Pay-as-you-go: You only pay for the actual resources your application consumes.
• Security Certifications: Meets the world's strictest standards like HIPAA and PCI.
• Extreme Complexity: It's easy to get lost among thousands of features; requires expertise.
• Hidden Costs: Can lead to unexpectedly high bills if not properly configured.
• Support Costs: Professional technical support requires an additional monthly fee.

Yandex Cloud: pros & cons

• Broad managed catalog: Compute, object storage, databases, Kubernetes, serverless, analytics and ML share one platform.
• Granular compute billing: VM CPU, RAM and eligible operating-system use accrue per second only while running.
• Cost controls: Billing dashboards, budgets, alert thresholds, grants and commitment discounts support governance.
• API-managed resources: Compute exposes HTTP APIs, IAM roles, quotas, instance groups, images and snapshots.
• Access is country-dependent: Official signup documentation notes unsupported countries and different payer/contract flows.
• Trial is not universal: Business customers and individuals receive different trial or consumption treatment, with grant exclusions.
• Stopped VM is not zero cost: Disks bill from creation to deletion; images, snapshots, IPs, licenses and traffic are separate.
• Regional/legal fit is specific: Currency, tax, data location, compliance and service availability depend on contracting entity and region.