The adoption of cloud computing has come a long way since its establishment. Therefore, it is no longer a question of whether to opt for cloud services or not. If you want to shift your organization’s IT environment to the cloud, there are many factors you need to consider while choosing a cloud service provider. However, the cloud computing market is flooded with various cloud service providers. Google Cloud Platform, Azure, and AWS stand out as the top three providers.
These cloud platforms dominate the public cloud landscape offering the flexible, safest, and reliable cloud services. So, if you want to migrate to the cloud but are worried about deciding which one to choose, this article will help you. Here, we are going to make a comparison on Azure VS AWS VS Google and their services. Before making a comparison, let us have an overview of these three cloud service providers. Let us get started.
About the big three cloud service providers
It is important to know about each of them in a little detail. Let us start with Amazon Web Services, a market leader for quite some time now.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Amazon Web Services started offering IT services to organizations in the form of web services back in 2006. These are now commonly known as cloud computing services. The key benefit of cloud computing is that you can replace up-front infrastructure costs with low variable costs that can scale with your business. AWS provides low, pay-as-you-go costs with no long-term commitments or up-front expenses.
Moreover, it is a secure cloud service platform that provides CDN, computing power, storage, networking, and databases to help businesses grow. Amazon provides highly reliable and scalable services that power thousands of businesses in 190 countries worldwide with data centres located in Europe, the U.S, Singapore, Japan, Australia, and Brazil.
Microsoft Azure
Azure is a cloud computing service developed by Microsoft to build, test, deploy, and manage services and applications using Microsoft-managed data centres. This cloud platform provides more than 200 services and products designed to help you bring innovative solutions to life for solving today’s challenges. It provides a platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Moreover, it supports several programming languages, frameworks, and tools, including Microsoft-specific and third-party systems and software.
Google Cloud Platform
It is a suite of cloud computing services provided by Google that runs on the same infrastructure used by Google internally for its end-user products. A set of management tools offers a series of modular services, such as computing, data analytics, data storage, and machine learning. In addition, GCP provides a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and serverless computing environments. Google started its journey in 2011, intending to strengthen its base of products. However, now, they have initiated enterprise-level services, so organizations sharing the same infrastructure like Google search can leverage it.
AWS VS Azure VS GCP
The top three cloud service providers that govern today’s market will be compared based on the most common cloud service providers.
- Compute
- Storage
- Database
- Networking
- Availability Zone
AWS VS Azure VS GCP — Compute Services
AWS Compute Services
Amazon’s primary compute service is the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It can integrate with Amazon Web Services to promote flexibility and compatibility that allows database administrators to optimize the cost. The scalable cloud platforms let you scale up or down in minutes and deploy thousands of server instances.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a scalable container orchestration that supports Docker containers using a series of API calls. You can use Docker-enabled applications, manage website IP addresses, query the state of your app, and access IAM roles, security groups, CloudWatch events, and more. There is also a registry feature in ECS and a Kubernetes container service.
AWS compute features include:
- AWS Serverless Application Repository
- Elastic Load Balancing
- VMware Cloud for AWS
- AWS Beanstalk
- Amazon Lightsail
- AWS Fargate
- AWS Batch
- AWS Lambda
Azure Compute Services
Azure compute services rely on a virtual machine network to enable various computing solutions, such as development, testing, app deployment, and datacenter extensions. It is an open-source platform compatible with Windows, Linux, SQL Server, SAP, and Oracle. Azure Kubernetes Service is a serverless container system that lets you deploy and manage containerized applications faster. In addition, it provides seamless integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) experience, enterprise governance, and security to unite diverse teams setting on a single platform.
Azure compute services include:
- Function-as-a-service (FaaS)
- Platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
- Azure Batch
- Service fabric
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Compute Services
GCP may be the right choice if you are a fan of Kubernetes containers, as it also supports Docker containers. You can allow the service to deploy applications and manage services for you, deploy code from Google Cloud, Assistant, or Firebase, and automatically scale based on traffic or use in real-time. Google Cloud Platform compute functions include
- Google App Engine
- Graphic Processing Unit (GPU)
- Docker container registry
- Compute Engine
- Knative
Storage, Database, and Backup Services — Comparison of AWS VS Azure VS GCP
One of the key benefits of cloud computing is its comprehensive storage capabilities. With most features, all three platforms are strong in different ways. Let us discuss the storage and database services for each.
AWS Storage and Database Services
AWS storage gateway is the hybrid storage service that enables on-premises applications to use AWS cloud storage seamlessly. Users can choose simple object storage with block or S3 storage for large containers using elastic block features. Moreover, elastic file storage enhances your capabilities as you create files. Therefore, it is ideal for large enterprises that generate bulk of data. AWS also provides many SQL-supported databases, a data migration service, and an ElastiCache feature to give additional memory.
Azure Storage and Database Services
The Azure storage platform is a cloud storage solution of Microsoft for advanced data storage scenarios. Core storage services provide a scalable object store for data objects, a file system service for the cloud, disk storage for Azure, a NoSQL store, and a messaging store for reliable messaging. In addition, it provides a reliable storage option called Blob Storage, reserved for REST-based, unstructured object warehousing. Moreover, Acure provides unlimited SQL storage. Their server stretch hybrid database provides on and off-premises storage for enterprises that use Microsoft SQL servers.
Storage
- Queue Storage
- Blob Storage
- Disk Storage
- File Storage
- Data Lake Storage
Database
- Database for MySQL
- Database for PostgreSQL
- Database for MySQL
- Server Stretch Database
- Data warehouse
- Table storage
- Redis cache
Backup Services
- Data Factory
- Recovery Backups
- Archival storage
- Site recovery
GCP Storage and Database Services
GCP provides basic storage and database services. Their storage solutions are the same as what GCP offers customers in the computing department, and they give both SQL and NoSQL support. In addition, GCP has a transfer appliance that is similar to AWS Snowball. The storage and database services GCP offers are listed below.
Storage
- Persistent disk
- Cloud storage
- Transfer service
- Transfer appliance
Database
- Cloud Bigtable
- Cloud Spanner
- Cloud SQL
- Cloud Datastore
Backup Services
- Nearline
- Codeline
Networking Services_ Comparison of AWS VS Azure VS GCP
Networking services in AWS
The networking services in AWS are categorized into three main areas based on their usage. These are:
- Network Architecture_ Services used inside the AWS for connecting cloud services and reveal those services to external users using the application delivery services.
- Application delivery_ Services are the delivery interface that faces the users of cloud services and applications built by the cloud users through AWS services.
- Network connectivity_ Services are used to develop connections from AWS cloud to the consumer’s on-premise system and VPCs within the cloud.
Networking services in Azure
Azure networking services offer many networking capabilities that can be leveraged together or separately. These include
connectivity services, application delivery services, application protection services, and network monitoring.
Networking services in GCP
Google cloud platform offers networking tools for managing and scaling your network. In addition, they offer networking services that help you manage your network based on your requirements. These include Virtual Private Cloud (VCP), Cloud DNS, hybrid connectivity, cloud load balancing, Cloud CDN, Cloud NAT, Cloud Armor, and Network Service Tiers.
Availability Zones_ AWS VS Azure VS GCP
Amazon Web Services is the oldest. Hence, it got more time to expand its network. However, AWS is hosting in different locations with Azure and GCP, but there are differences in availability zones.
- At present, Amazon Web Services has 66 availability zones.
- Azure accommodates 54 regions across the world and is available in 140 countries.
- Google Cloud Platform is available in 20 regions worldwide, with three more on their way.
Conclusion
As we mentioned earlier, the battle for the most prominent cloud vendor rages on, but the competition is tough between the three most popular ones. So, which cloud service provider is the best among these three is a difficult decision. We have discussed that each cloud service provider provides an impressive list of features you can select based on your requirements. In the end, the best service provider is the one that is right for your needs. Utilize this comprehensive guide, compare these service providers and make an informed decision on which one is best for your organization.
