AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud Platform

The top three cloud giants that strike to our mind when we talk about business cloud offerings are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. The competition is growing rapidly in the public cloud space as these vendors regularly drop their pricing cost and provide new updated features. Undoubtedly, they offer a wide range of products covering almost every online operation any business would ever need. However, the main difference between these brands lies not only in its cost but also in how they group their various cloud services. Without wasting any time further, let’s compare them one after another and learn how they differ in terms of their services.

Why Choose Cloud?

Millions of companies ranging from public to the private sector depend on the cloud services for the various types of online operations. Choosing cloud is beneficial as it allows the companies to focus on what they do best and almost all the technicalities are handled by the infrastructure itself that is being upgraded constantly. On the other hand, if they opt for the physical infrastructure, it would cost them a lot as well as consume more time, which is not at all efficient and wise. Some of the main benefits of using cloud services are no upfront costs, pay per use system, per minute billing and no termination fees. The solutions through which you can avail these benefits are big data, digital marketing, gaming, Internet of Things, e-commerce and lot more.

Comparison between AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform

Ever since the first AWS Service that was launched in 2004, Amazon continues to offer a number of cloud computing services with better features in every update. After that, Google and Microsoft also came up with their own infrastructure and offer deals at comparatively less cost. Being the first cloud service provider, Amazon is the most top-rated vendor that support many businesses by providing the effective cloud services and solutions. Hence, it is the most expensive among the three.

Let us see the difference in the services provided by them:

1. Compute

Computer systems are meant to process data i.e. to compute but for faster processing or data analysis, you can either use cloud or buy more hardware. Buying hardware will ensure that it is owned by you but you are also paying a huge amount for processing and maintenance. When you switch to cloud, you only pay as per your usage and scale according to the processing nodes. It can be discussed in three ways:

• Scalable Computing on demand

The Amazon’s service, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offers scalable computing on demand, giving competition to Google’s Compute engine and Azure’s Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine scale sets. The service provided by Amazon is very costly & same is the case of Azure’s VM. So, Google’s services are much better and the cost is quite flexible.

• Renting Computing Processes

If you are trying to rent the computing processes for mobile and web apps, one can use services provided by either EC2 or Compute Engine & avail big savings.

• Deploy Software Containers

For deploying software containers with Docker, you can use Amazon’s EC2 Container service (ECS) & EC2 Container Registry (ECR). Similarly, Google also provides the services but Azure does not support Private Docker registries as of now. But Azure allow you to deploy Windows client apps with its RemoteApp service.

2. Storage

Another main feature of any cloud services is storage through which one can store anything ranging from data of 1 GB to several PBs. The cloud storage service is different from regular hosting instead, you need interaction with APIs or third-party programs before operating your storage in the cloud. Storage can be discussed in three ways:

• Storing

For storing objects, Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is at the peak since it has been used for quite a long time. The Google’s cloud storage & Azure Storage also offers similar services that are quite reliable but the resources stored in Amazon is huge as compared to the other two.

• Archiving

This option is used for storing objects that do not need to be accessed on a regular basis, which is why it is called as ‘cold storage’. The archiving service can be availed at a lower price as compared to storing but also with lower access speeds. The features and cost of the services are almost same under different names like AWS’s Glacier, Azure’s Storage and Google’s Cloud Storage Nearline.

• Other options

You can avail more specific options apart from storing and archiving like Amazon CloudFront for the purpose of Content Delivery Network (CDN). Similarly, you can use Google’s Cloud CDN as well as Azure’s CDN.

3. Analytics

Dealing with a large amount of data is quite difficult, which is why big data came into existence. Through detailed analysis, data are monitored to find out the predictions that will be helpful in making business decisions. Google is leading ahead in the market of big data not just with the big data technologies like MapReduce but also with the wide range of products such as BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Dataproc, Cloud Datalab and many other. Amazon and Azure also support big data with the services named Elastic MapReduce (EMR) and HDInsight respectively.

Other than the concept of big data, there is another term called business intelligence through which unstructured and structured data are analyzed to identify business opportunities. For this purpose, Amazon’s QuickSight helps in extracting valuable business insights.

Google is not just offering good service in the field of Machine Learning, which is a part of Artificial Intelligence (AI) but also for leveraging products they need to build the apps. APIs supported by Google are Cloud Vision, Google Translate, Cloud Speech, Cloud Natural Language, etc. On the other hand, you can also use Azure Machine Learning and Amazon Machine Learning.

4. Locations

Before you deploy cloud services, many organizations choose the location of the data center in such a way that it is close to their target users. Doing so will help in providing enhanced user experience and reducing the latency. Amazon’s AWS services are at the top, as it has the most extensive coverage across the world. Next would be Azure having good support for Asia and Google has strong coverage in the north US regions but lags behind in Europe, Asia, South America, etc.

Make sure that take the right decision when you need to deploy at different locations, as it comes at different rates. Usually, the cheapest rates can be availed while deploying in the US and Europe.

Apart from all the main cloud services discussed above, there are many that we have not included such as Networking or Databases. We have clearly seen the comparisons between the top three cloud service providers in the world i.e. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure & Google Cloud Platform, and their services. Clavax is one of the top IT companies, which is also a part of AWS partner network that offers a wide range of web services as well as marketing support to enhance clients’ businesses.