Cloud Services Comparison: Amazon vs Microsoft Azure vs Google Cloud

Introduction

As companies are gaining business momentum at a rampant pace, the use and application of different cloud services have become talk of the town. Companies are shifting from self-maintained data centers, as they are expensive to maintain and are not fully scalable. Cloud services have proved to be pivotal in resolving security concerns faced by companies. The companies are now moving on cloud services at very significant rate.

According to Gartner, the IaaS market has touched the figure of $25 Billion in 2016 and is expected to reach at $45 by 2018. After having so much potential the war among cloud service providers has intensified, making it more difficult to choose the best IaaS provider. Here we will give a brief comparison among 3 big IaaS providers Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Google cloud.

Features and Services

Selecting a cloud service provider is completely dependent upon the requirements of business done by the company, i.e. data processing, data-storage, customer communication (using their CRM) and etc. Also they may require some tasks to be done on one cloud provider and some task on another other called the multi-cloud approach.

However, cloud providers share some common features of a public cloud i.e. self-service and instant provisioning, security, auto scalability, compliance and identity management.

AWS provided the “Amazon Machine Learning service” feature back in April 2015 to help developers develop machine learning models. AWS also started to provide three new “machine learning services” feature for image recognition (AWS Recognition), Engine used by Alexa (Lex) and text to speech deep learning models (Polly) back in 2016.

Google also provides “Cloud Machine Learning Engine“, which allow developers to build models using its open source Tensor Flow deep learning library. Google also provides the services such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Google translation with the support of multiple languages and Google vision.

Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning Studio provides the functionality to developers to write, test and deploy algorithms, as well as a marketplace for off-the-shelf APIs.

Database, Storage, Computation, and Networking

When we talk about computation power Microsoft Azure provides Virtual Machines (VMs), with the support of many tools i.e. Cloud Services and Resource Manager in order to deploy applications for production and autoscaling as well.

Amazon’s biggest feature is “EC2 instances”, it has lot of options and functionalities in it. Amazon also provides services i.e. the EC2 Container service, AWS Lambda and Autoscaling and Elastic Beanstalk for app deployment.

Google provides Virtual Machines in their data centers for computation purposes. These VM’s are light weight and can be boot very quickly, these VMs have persistent disk storage, consistent performance and can be customized as per requirements of the business.

Customers have option to use following relational databases SQL Database, SQL server stretch Database for Microsoft Azure , Relational Database Service, Redshift for Amazon and Google Cloud SQL having support of MySQL at the moment.

For storage purpose Amazon has Simple Storage (S3), Elastic File System (EFS), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), Import / Export with huge volume of data transfer service, Glacier archive backup and Storage Gateway, which integrates with on-premise environments.

While the Microsoft’s provides Azure Blob block storage, Queue and File storage and Azure Storage service. Azure also supports Site Recovery, Import Export and Backup of data.

Google provides the following storage services i.e. Google Cloud Storage standard, Google Cloud Storage RS, Google Cloud Storage Nearline and Google Cloud Storage Coldline

All of these cloud vendor has the networking capabilities with automated server load balancing having same caliber.

Pricing

Pricing or cost of moving to cloud is an attractive thing, charging of using clouds are comparable very less with respect to personal premises.

Comparing the price among these three cloud vendors is very difficult as they offer different packages and charging rates on use of services. Also the price of use of cloud is getting lower day by day, one of the main reason is competition among vendor to attract more business to their clouds. Currently Amazon charge the customers on hourly basis, while Google and Microsoft azure on Per minute basis

The good thing is that all of these vendor a version to some extent to developers and to attract new businesses.

Conclusion

Currently the Amazon is a market leader with its cloud services, Amazon provides wide range of features which are very helpful for all type of enterprises. Also it is continuously increasing its capacity in term of infrastructure which results in term of lower the prices. But still its gap with other vendors is vanishing day by day.

Microsoft has made huge investment in term of infrastructure and technology to compete with big names. For the existing customers of Microsoft Azure it will be a strong vendor in term of technology and it ongoing progress curve.

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