AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud: The Comparison Guide

Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Compute Engine or Google Cloud – these are the three main public Cloud vendors in the Cloud Infrastructure Services, also known as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) market. IaaS platforms virtualize datacenter infrastructure like compute, storage and networking and can be bought by the customers based on their consumption. IaaS providers manage the networking, storage, virtualization, servers, and hard drives as well as provide other services like message brokers and databases.
Here’s a brief comparison of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) pioneered IaaS in 2006. Being the leader in innovation, AWS is the most preferred choice for customers migrating to IaaS. AWS has more than 2000 consulting partners for managed and professional services. On the other hand, AWS implementation requires deep technical expertise. As its pricing structure is complex, using third party cost management tools is recommended. Very few AWS services are covered by an SLA.

Offerings:

• Xen Virtualized multitenant and single tenant compute
• CDN (S3 and CloudFront)
• File Storage (Elastic File System)
• Docker Container service (EC2)
• Iaas+Paas Capabilities
• Serverless Computing (Lambda)
• Batch Computing (AWS Batch)
• aPaaS (Elastic Beanstalk)
• Third party software and services
• Block Storage (SSDs and magnetic spinning hard drive disks, EBS)

AWS offers 99.95% availability for block storage and 5TB object size limit. It also offers an IoT platform.

Microsoft Azure

With the launch of Azure VMs in 2012, Microsoft; which previously was strictly PaaS, diversified into IaaS. Azure is bundled with other Microsoft products and services too. It also offers hybrid cloud computing for hyperconverged infrastructure.

Offerings:

• Hyper-V Virtualized multitenant compute
• Iaas+ Paas Capabilities
• File Storage (Azure File Storage)
• Object Storage
• CDN
• Container service (Docker-based, Azure Container Service)
• Batch computing
• Serverless Computing (Azure Functions)
• Third party software and services
• Block Storage (SSDs and magnetic spinning hard drive disks, Managed Disks)

Azure offers 99.99% availability SLA for block storage and 500TB per account limit for object size. It supports Windows as well as Linux VMs. Azure too has its own IoT platform.

Google Cloud

With the launch of Google Compute Engine in 2012, Google entered IaaS space; although it had an aPaaS offering since 2008.

Offerings:

• IaaS+PaaS capabilities
• Docker Container Service (Container Engine)
• Open-source fuse adapter for file storage.
• Serverless Computing (Google Cloud Functions)
• Third party software and services
• Block Storage (SSDs and magnetic spinning hard drive disks, Persistent Disks)

Google offers 99.95% availability for block storage and 5TB object size limit. The pricing model is based on sustained usage with lesser per unit cost as the usage increases.

Conclusion

Customers usually prefer having a multi-cloud strategy, using public and private clouds together. Azure has 34% of the market share of running applications on Cloud, while AWS and Google have 57% and 15% respectively. Other vendors like IBM Bluemix, Oracle, and Alibaba also have a sizable footprint in the IaaS space. Depending on the requirements of specific use cases, the customers can choose which Cloud IaaS vendor suits their needs.

AFourTech provides heroic support to manage these public cloud platforms.