Three main players of business cloud services have an array of products covering all you can possibly need for your online operations. But there are differences not only in pricing but also in how they name and group their services, so let’s compare one next to another and find out what they offer.
We'll focus on services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure. We won't cover all of them, or get into much detail about the infrastructure of cloud computing. However, you will be exposed to many of the products you can use, and hopefully get familiar with some cloud concepts.
Why the Cloud
Iconic companies from both the public and the private sector --- such as Netflix, AirBNB, Spotify, Expedia, PBS, and many, many more --- rely on cloud services for supporting their online operations. This allows them to better focus on doing what they're known for, and let many of the technicalities be taken care of by an infrastructure that already exists and is constantly being upgraded. If they had to implement the physical infrastructure they actually need for their operations themselves, they would need an army of technicians, lots of extra budget and time, and many startups would never get past these technical challenges.
For everyone
But this is not limited to big names. Today, we live in a world in which both a huge business, and two youngsters at home with virtually no initial capital, can access world-class infrastructure for storage, computing, management and more, to make the next massive online service, and pay as they go --- literally --- by the hour.
Flexible (and sometimes intricate) pricing
What you pay will vary a lot depending and how much processing power you demand, how many instances (that is, how many virtual servers) you deploy, and where you deploy them (more on this on the “Locations” section). There will also be significant discounts for bulk usage. In any case, you'll have these advantages most of the time:
- no upfront costs
- no termination fees
- pay only for what you use
- per minute billing
For precise details, you'll need to read the pricing fine print of AWS, GCP and Azure.
Products vs Solutions
We will use the terms "products" and "services" rather indistinctly; a solution, however, is a more specific concept that you'll hear a lot about when dealing with cloud services. Simply put, a solution is a set of preconfigured products oriented to a very specific need, with plentiful documentation, use cases and testimonials that will guide you through the process of adopting the cloud infrastructure.
Some typical "canned" solutions are:
- big data — AWS, GCP, Azure
- digital marketing — AWS, Azure
- ecommerce — AWS, GCP, Azure
- gaming — AWS, GCP,
- government — AWS (federal, sate and local)
- Internet of Things (IoT) — AWS, GCP, Azure (predictive maintenance, remote monitoring)
- private clouds
- reseller hosting
Let's Compare!
Amazon introduced "commoditized" cloud computing services through its first AWS service launched back in 2004, and ever since then they kept innovating and adding features, which somehow allowed them having the upper hand in the business by building the most extensive array of services and solutions for the cloud. They are also, in many regards, the most expensive.
Google, and later Microsoft, came into the game and are quickly coming up to par, bringing their own infrastructure and ideas, offering deals, and pulling the prices down.
In this video, representatives of each company discuss their cloud strategies: Cloud Wars: Amazon (AWS) vs. Google (GCP) vs. Microsoft (Azure):
Compute
This is what computers are for, after all: to calculate, to process data --- to compute. If you need faster processing for graphics rendering, data analysis or what have you, you can either buy more hardware, or you can go on the cloud.
Sure, if you buy the hardware you own it, it's an asset, but you're also paying for all of the idle time when the computers are not doing any actual processing, plus all of the maintenance that comes with it, which can go really high if you build a data center.
When you go on the cloud, on the other hand, you just pay for what you use and you can scale to thousands of processing nodes in a few minutes (and blow your credit card while at it, if you're not careful).
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is Amazon's flagship for scalable computing on demand, competing with Google's Compute Engine and Azure's Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Amazon's service is the most comprehensive, but as mentioned, the pricing for EC2 can get very intricate, and the same goes for Azure's VMs pricing. Google's offering is somewhat less flexible, but the pricing is a lot easier to follow (see pricing section).
There's also the option of renting computing processes for web and mobile apps, which can offer significant savings when used instead of EC2 or Compute Engine if your apps fit in the specs of this service (see AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Google App Engine for more details).
If you want to deploy software containers with Docker, you should look at Amazon's EC2 Container Service (ECS) and EC2 Container Registry (ECR); Google's equivalent are Container Engine and Container Registry. Azure's also on board with Docker with its Container Service, though at the moment they are not providing a facility for private Docker registries.
Azure, since it's Microsoft's, also allows you to deploy Windows client apps with its RemoteApp service.
Continue reading %A Side-by-Side Comparison of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure%
by Lucero del Alba via SitePoint
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