AWS vs. Azure vs. Google: Detailed Cloud Comparison

Key Strengths

As we touched on before, the market leader among cloud providers can boast the breadth and depth of the services in a database, compute, analytics, storage, networking, management, mobile, developer tools, machine learning, IoT, security, and enterprise applications — altogether, you’ll find more than 175 services.

AWS offered public IaaS in 2006. As they’ve been in this run for almost 14 years, it’s not a surprise that another advantage is the maturity of the IaaS and the entire AWS ecosystem. What’s more, AWS has an all-in global coverage and a secure network that guarantees that you will find what you need even for the most sensitive applications.

What is more, AWS provides DeepLens, an AI-powered camera for building and implementing machine learning techniques for optical character recognition and picture or objects detection, as part of its many Intelligence offerings. AWS has released Gluon, an open-source deep-learning library that allows developers and non-developers alike to swiftly create neural networks with no prior understanding of AI. In fact, AWS offers a diverse range of machine learning and AI solutions. SageMaker, which is used to train and deploy machine learning models, is another AWS service. It also includes the Lex conversational interface, which enables Alexa applications, as well as Greengrass IoT communication and Lambda cloud hosting processing.

Weaknesses

Some advantages may simultaneously turn into weaknesses. The vast number of AWS services and options is something that attracts customers and at the same time scares them a bit. Many companies see that employees need decent training on the AWS ecosystem to manage it appropriately. AWS also requires a lot of setup work, which cannot be said about other cloud services, that provide ‘out of the box’ solutions. Many people consider that a huge drawback of AWS is the absence of a specific “hybrid cloud” solution like Microsoft offers.

Cloud Prices Comparison

When referring to AWS vs. Azure vs. Google pricing, AWS prices are very competitive, because of the cost structures and the rising competition in the cloud market share. For startups and individuals, it offers free tiers of service. Additionally, development teams can buy servers by the second, not by the hour. Users also can use AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate the cost for their architecture solution as well as configure a cost estimate that fits their unique business or personal needs.

Microsoft Azure

Features

Microsoft Azure offers almost the same list of features and services as AWS does. However, there’s some additional functionality that might be beneficial for the businesses that didn’t find AWS a completely suitable platform for their needs. The platform provides an opportunity to deploy and manage virtual machines as a scale. It allows processing and computing within minutes and at whatever capacity you need. Both AWS and Azure handle software that runs large-scale parallel batch computing which is an advantage over Google Cloud Platform.

- Data Resiliency. Azure cloud storage keeps your data secure on Microsoft data centers. Any information that you keep in Azure storage will have three more copies by default. If there are any issues with data availability, you will still have access to it from the other two copies.

- Data Security. Azure encrypts data in multiple ways. By default, Azure Storage services are all enabled for Storage-side Encryption (SSE), which uses 256-bit AES encryption. Azure Key Vault allows customers to use their own keys for encryption.

- BCDR (Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery) Integration. Azure storage can be integrated with a user's BCDR strategy with options for Backup and disaster recovery. Azure Backup agent and Azure Site Recovery are used for making backups and restoring data centers.

- Capacity Management. StorSimple, hybrid architecture storage, addresses all the storage requirements of enterprise business. Data is placed in the SSD, HDD, or cloud storage tier by the automated data tiering feature. There are also build in deduplication and compression features that help with storage capacity usage optimization.

- Single-Pane Operations. It allows connecting with various data sources, collecting and analyzing logs, and providing insights. OMS also offers automation and security solutions to ease the process of working with hybrid infrastructures.

Key Strengths

Microsoft offers significant discounts on Azure which is attractive to new customers. And it's not the only one advantage, as those who have chosen Azure usually like it and don’t change the platform. What’s unique about Azure is that it focuses on hybrid cloud setups. Larger enterprises need true hybrid cloud setups, which Azure offers. Besides, if you are using other services provided by Microsoft (like .NET) they integrate easily with existing infrastructure.

Microsoft offers machine learning and a bot service on Azure, as part of its heavy investment in the disciplines of machine learning and AI. Bing Web Search API, Text Analytics API, Face API, Computer Vision API, and Custom Vision Service are among the cognitive services available. Microsoft also offers many management and analytics services for IoT, as well as Functions, their cloud-based solution. In addition, Azure provides a number of tools to assist in the maintenance of the Microsoft software. Windows Server Backup in Windows Server R2 and Windows Server are linked via Azure Backup. Visual Studio applications are hosted on Azure through Visual Studio Team Services.

Weaknesses

Although Azure is the best option for Microsoft ecosystem users, its support for others operating systems is limited. AWS wins in this battle because of the customization potential.

Cloud Prices Comparison

Microsoft Azure has discounts and credits to existing customers as well as newcomers. Unlike AWS, Azure charges users by the minute, without a minimum minutes number. Those who decided to make short-term commitments will also be surprised by nice pricing models.

Google Cloud Services

Features

Google Cloud Platform is relatively a newcomer. Besides Windows server versions, Google supports several generations of Linux and has multiple services for developers, like the App Engine product. With the help of this server, developers can create apps without dealing with the server and in an agile manner.

- Cloud storage. Google Cloud Storage uses super fast persistent disks compared with other cloud datastores and offers persistent object storage. Hadoop, Big Table, important technologies pioneered by Google like Big Query, Big Table, Hadoop, Big Query technologies are integrated and fully supported. If you are looking for something to work with machine learning or Big Data analytics Google Cloud is a perfect choice.

- Cloud Functions. Superfast serverless platform on Google that allows building event-based microservices. There’s no need for the developer resource management, to permit events to trigger functions.

- Google Container Engine. It allows running docker containers on Google Cloud which are triggered by Kubernetes.

- Compute. Similar to AWS and Azure, Google Compute Engine permits users launch VMs into certain regions and availability groups and has already outperformed competitors. What also makes Google Cloud shine among Azure and AWS is that it doesn’t require pre-warming like other providers.

Key Strengths

Although Google occupies the smallest percentage of the market share, it still has a huge number of fans, because they proved themselves as a viable IaaS competitor. Intuitive simplicity and easy-to-use interface make this platform stand out among the top three. An expertise Google has with big data analytics and ML applications enables customers to easily leverage that expertise from within Google Cloud Services. It also allows users to enjoy high-quality networking, storage, computing, and databases with GCP. Google differs from its competitors by the number of services. Although the number isn’t as high, developers can find a perfect match by looking through the requirements for mobile apps projects.
Google Cloud includes APIs for basic language, voice, translations, and more, among other innovative tools. In addition to this, it provides IoT and cloud platform capabilities, although only as beta trials. In terms of AI development, Google Cloud is now the dominant player. TensorFlow, an open-source software library for developing machine learning applications, deserves credit for this. TensorFlow is a powerful language amongst programmers.

Weaknesses

One of the biggest disadvantages is that the Google Cloud platform is a B2C business and large enterprises find it’s challenging to work with their cloud services. Being the newest cloud out of the big three, Google is the least mature concerning offerings variety.

Cloud prices comparison

The same as Azure, Google bills customers by the minute, however, has a 10-minute minimum. The possibility to use simple per-minute rates and automatic discount options set apart Google Cloud from other platforms.

AWS vs. Azure vs. Google: What Platform Would you Choose?

Now it’s time for you to make a decision. As reflected, when you exactly know what your project needs are, it will be straightforward what cloud provider to choose. We hope that this comparison of cloud services was helpful and has given you some extra knowledge concerning cloud computing for your future choice.