Cloud Technologies Compared — AWS vs Azure vs GCP
Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources with pay-as-you-go pricing over the Internet. Instead of purchasing, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, users can access technology services, such as storage, computing power, and databases, on a needed basis from a cloud provider.
Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google GCP dominate the public cloud by providing the safest, most reliable, and most flexible cloud services.
They provide a wide range of storage, computing, and networking options.
AWS is considered bigger in terms of functionality and maturity, whereas Azure and GCP are progressing at a faster rate to prove their market dominance.
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According to the Gartner research report, it positions AWS, Microsoft, and Google in the Leaders quadrant of the new 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services (CIPS).
Amazon Web Services
Amazon launched the cloud computing platform in 2006 before Azure and GCP. This platform allowed different organizations to utilize reliable IT infrastructure based on their needs and requirements.
Availability regions: Amazon Web Service divides into 22 geographic regions and 14 data centers. There are over 114 edge locations and 12 Regional Edge Caches as of September 2021.
AWS has bigger community support and has well-known customers like Samsung, Disney+, etc.,
AWS Top Products
AWS is like a portfolio and is separated into different services which can be configured based on the user needs in different ways with the help of different configuration options and individual server maps for each AWS service.
AWS provides different services, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and packaged software as a service (SaaS). Amazon services provide organizations with tools such as computing power, content delivery, and database storage.
Most Popular Services of AWS
- Amazon EC2 — Provides virtual servers and can be tailored based on the workload type and application. (Compute)
- Amazon RDS — Provides services to setup, operate and scale databases in the cloud (Database)
- Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3) -– offers scalable object storage for data backup. Users can store files or data in S3 buckets and keep them organized. (Storage)
- Elastic Block Store (EBS) — Provides block storage service and is designed for use with Amazon EC2. Enterprise applications, big data analytics engines, and file systems are deployed in Amazon EBS. (Storage)
- Amazon Cloud Front — Provides content delivery network service for security and high performance. (Content Delivery)
Microsoft Azure
Azure was launched in 2010 and later renamed Microsoft Azure in 2014.
Availability regions: Microsoft Azure operates in 54 regions, each with at least three availability zones and 116 edge locations as of September 2021
Azure has well-known customers like BNY Mellon, Fiserv, Walmart, etc.
Azure cloud has more than 200 products and services designed to build, run and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises, with tools and frameworks of the user’s choice.
Azure Top Products
- AI + Machine learning
- Compute
- Containers
- Hybrid + multi-cloud
- Internet Of Things (IoT)
Azure offers four different cloud computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and serverless functions.
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Most Popular Services of AWS
- Virtual Machines — Azure virtual machines help perform tasks without buying and maintaining the physical machine. Based on demand, the user can pay, use the VM, and be shut down when not required.
- Azure Virtual desktop — Resides in the cloud and provides virtual desktop and remote apps with unprecedented scale and reduced costs.
- Azure SQL is a cloud database service that can create highly available and high-performance data storage layers for applications.
- Azure App Service enables users to build and host apps and restful APIs without managing infrastructure.
- Azure DevOps — Provides entire application life cycle and DevOps capabilities. Projects can be managed from requirements to automated builds until shipping software.
Google Cloud Platform
GCP was launched in the year of 2011. Customers like Twitter, Paypal, and Spotify use the Google cloud platform.
Availability regions: Google Cloud Platform comprises 34 cloud regions, 103 zones, and 200 plus edge locations as of September 2021
GCP has 100+ products, and some of its featured products are
- Compute Engine
- Cloud Storage
- Cloud SDK
- Cloud SQL
- Cloud CDN
Most Popular Services of GCP
- Google App Engine — Developers can create, deploy and manage their apps directly on the cloud. This gives the advantage of hosting applications on the same systems that power Google apps.
- Google Compute Engine — Provides cloud-based scalable and flexible Virtual machines.
- Google Cloud Storage — provides organizations the advantage of storing huge amounts of data, including but not limited to media, entertainment, etc. Also, it provides flexibility to choose from database storage options such as Cloud SQL for MYSQL relational storage and data storage for No SQL non-relational storage and Google’s cloud Big table database.
- BigQuery is a data analytics service where data analysts or business persons can analyze big data and provide the ability to perform queries and share insights on the data through the web.
Which Cloud Service Provider should you choose?
There is no ultimate answer to the question of which cloud service provider to choose. Simply define your needs and conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the many cloud service providers accessible.
Talk to our experts at Payoda and get a free consultation.
Authored by: Hemalatha Rajendran
