Cloud Computing has come a long way since its inception. The adoption of cloud computing has now become a key force for businesses today, as applications are moved out of on-premise data centers to the cloud to innovate, cut expenses and increase agility. Microsoft, Amazon and Google dominate the public cloud landscape giving the most secure, adaptable and reliable cloud services. Their respective cloud platforms, Azure, AWS and Google Cloud Platform offer customers a range of storage, computing and networking choices. To go into detail on how Azure can work for your business, it would be ideal to approach azure migration consulting services; and the same goes for AWS and GCP. But to get started on the big Azure vs AWS vs GCP debate, read ahead.
The three principle players of business cloud services — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — have an array of products covering everything you require for your online tasks. However, there are contrasts not only in pricing but also in how they name and group their services, so let’s compare one next to another and see what they offer.
We’ll focus on services provided by Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure, initially called Azure, was launched in 2010 with the aim to give a capable cloud computing platform for organizations. Azure was renamed as ‘Microsoft Azure’ in 2014, though the name ‘Azure’ is still commonly used. Since its origin, Microsoft Azure has shown great progress among its competitors.
The Microsoft Azure platform has been designed for building, deploying and managing various services and applications through the big network of Microsoft-managed datacenters. Moreover, if your custom software needs to run large-scale parallel batch computing, it can handle it too. This is a unique feature to AWS and Azure over the Google Cloud Platform. Azure’s offerings include networking, computing, data management databases and performance.
When considering Azure pricing, you need to remember that the costs will rely upon the kind of products the development team needs. The hourly server cost can range from $0.099 per hour to $0.149 per hour. Azure has the lowest on-demand and discounted instance pricing. Obviously, if you measure the costs by just per instance, the expenses probably won’t appear to be steady. However, the prices are quite equivalent to AWS when you factor in the price per GB of RAM. As the main enterprise cloud service providers compete for your business, the prices remain competitive across the board. Specialist developers can write, test and deploy algorithms using the Azure Machine Learning Studio.
In addition to the full set of features and adjustable pricing, the Azure platform is one of the quickest cloud solutions available. If you are searching for a solution that excels in speed of deployment, operation or scalability, at that point you might need to pick the Azure platform. They are the pioneer in speed with regards to cloud computing solutions.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary of amazon.com, which provides an on-demand cloud computing platform to individuals, companies, and governments based on subscription. A pioneer of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services is the oldest and the most experienced player in the cloud market with presence of over a decade and leads in terms of both the number of products and customers. AWS is viewed as the benchmark of cloud service quality.
AWS offers a range of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings that can be characterized into computing, content delivery and storage, database and networking. AWS was publicly launched in 2006 with service offerings such as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), etc. By 2009, Elastic Block Store (EBS) was made public and services such as Amazon CloudFront, Content delivery network (CDN), and more formally joined the AWS Cloud Computing Service offerings.
AWS contributes to significant enhancement in the productivity and business development of organizations. Some of the disadvantages of AWS include the complex infrastructure and default service limits which are set as per normal client needs.
Google Cloud Platform
For the past 15 years, Google has been building one of the quickest, generally powerful, and the best quality cloud frameworks on the planet. Internally, Google itself utilizes this framework for several high-traffic and worldwide services, including Gmail, Maps, YouTube and Search. In view of the size and scale of these services, Google has put a lot of work into advancing its framework and making a suite of tools and services to manage it effectively. GCP puts this foundation and these management resources readily available.
The Google Cloud Platform has a myriad of services for developers. It’s a completely managed solution for developing applications in an agile way. Furthermore, you can manage high- level computing, storage, system administration and databases with GCP. These are all great products to utilize depending on the type of development you are dealing with. Although Google has fewer services than the competitors, you can track all the necessities for development projects.
Google Cloud was developed by Google and launched in 2008. It was written in Java, C++, Python including Ruby. It also provides the different services that are IaaS, PaaS and Serverless platforms. While all the three cloud providers offer discounts up to 75 percent for a commitment of one to three years, Google additionally offers a sustained use discount of up to 30 percent on each instance type running for more than 25 percent each month.
In July 2020, Google Cloud presented Big Query Omni, another new multi-cloud analytics solution, powered by its hybrid and multi-cloud Anthos platform, that permits clients to run a similar database in multiple cloud and data center environments. The new package extends Google Cloud’s analytics platform to other public clouds without leaving the BigQuery user interface and without having to move or copy datasets. It’s available in private alpha for Amazon Web Services’ Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and support for Microsoft Azure is coming soon.
Where GCP may fall behind in additional features, it compensates for cost efficiency. The platform has a pay as you go pricing model, with billing to the “per second” of use. Setting GCP apart, it offers discounts for long-term usage that begins after the first month. This is great if you need to start a new mobile application development project and need to minimize expenses. By contrast, it could take over a year to get long term discounts on the other cloud service providers. Clearly, Google is putting pressure on the competing cloud providers to keep market prices lower.
AWS and GCP both have points of presence (POPs) located in many more locations around the world. These POP locations help cache content closer to end users. However, each platform uses their respective POP locations in different ways:
- AWS uses POPs to provide a content delivery network (CDN) service, Amazon CloudFront.
- GCP uses POPs to provide Google Cloud CDN (Cloud CDN) and to deliver built-in edge caching for services such as Google App Engine and Google Cloud Storage.
Conclusion
Comparing AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud would leave you with numerous features and expenses to consider. Rather than trying to choose a solution, use enterprise cloud services that fit your development needs. You can get this by analyzing offerings from your preferred cloud provider. Or, you can consolidate services from two or three of these providers. Since the expenses are relatively comparable, find the right mix of solutions to fit your enterprise development requirements. Each of the three cloud platforms AWS, Azure and GCP are unique in their own way and offer a plethora of options for organizations to select from based on their specific requirements.