The Cloud Platform of Your Choice: AWS vs Azure vs GCP

Amazon, Microsoft and Google dominate the public cloud landscape providing the safest, flexible and reliable cloud services. Their respective cloud platforms, AWS, Azure and GCP offer clients a range of storage, computing and networking options.

Some of the features common among the three platforms include instant provisioning, self-service, autoscaling, identity management, security and compliance, among others.

At present, AWS can be considered to be much bigger than both Azure and GCP in terms of functionality and maturity.

However, the other two are also progressing at a faster rate to prove their market dominance.

Features	AWS	Azure	GCP
Compute Services	AWS Beanstalk Amazon EC2 Amazon EC2 Auto-Scaling Amazon Elastic Container Registry Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Amazon Lightsail  AWS Serverless Application Repository  VMware Cloud for AWS AWS Batch AWS Fargate AWS Lambda AWS Outposts Elastic Load Balancing	Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) Function-as-a-service (FaaS) Service Fabric Azure Batch Cloud Services Container Instances Batch Azure Container Service (AKS) Virtual Machines Compute Engine  Virtual Machine Scale Sets	App Engine Docker Container Registry Instant Groups Compute Engine Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Knative Kubernetes Functions
Storage Services	Simple Storage Service (S3) Elastic Block Storage (EBS) Elastic File System (EFS) Storage Gateway Snowball Snowball Edge Snowmobile	Blob Storage Queue Storage File Storage Disk Storage Data Lake Store	Cloud Storage Persistent Disk Transfer Appliance Transfer Service
AI/ML	SageMaker Comprehend Lex Polly Rekognition Machine Learning Translate Transcribe DeepLens Deep Learning AMIs Apache MXNet on AWS TensorFlow on AWS	Machine Learning Azure Bot Service Cognitive Services	Cloud Machine Learning Engine Dialogflow Enterprise Edition Cloud Natural Language Cloud Speech API Cloud Translation API Cloud Video Intelligence Cloud Job Discovery (Private Beta)
Database Services	Aurora RDS DynamoDB ElastiCache Redshift Neptune Database Migration Service	SQL Database Database for MySQL Database for PostgreSQL Data Warehouse Server Stretch Database Cosmos DB Table Storage Redis Cache Data Factory	Cloud SQL Cloud Bigtable Cloud Spanner Cloud Datastore
Backup Services	Glacier	Archive Storage Backup Site Recovery	Nearline (frequently accessed data) Coldline (infrequently accessed data)
Serverless computing	Lambda Serverless Application Repository	Functions	Google Cloud Functions
Strengths	Dominant market position Extensive, mature offerings Support for large organizations Global reach Flexibility and a wider range of services	Second largest provider Integration with Microsoft tools and software Broad feature set Hybrid cloud Support for open source Ideal for startups and developers	Designed for cloud-native businesses Commitment to open source and portability Flexible contracts DevOps expertise Complete container-based model Most cost-efficient
Caching	Elastic Cache	Redis Cache	Cloud CDN
File Storage	EFS	Azure Files	ZFS and Avere
Networking	Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)	Azure Virtual Network (VNET)	Cloud Virtual Network
Security	AWS Security Hub	Azure Security Center	Cloud Security Command Center
Location	77 availability zones within 24 geographic regions	Presence in 60+ regions across the world	Presence in 24 regions and 73 zones. Available in 200+ countries and territories
Documentation	Best in class	High quality	High quality
DNS Services	Amazon Route 53	Azure Traffic Manager	Cloud DNS
Notifications	Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)	Azure Notification Hub	None
Load Balancing	Elastic Load Balancing	Load Balancing for Azure	Cloud Load Balancing
Automation	AWS Opsworks	Azure Automation	Compute Engine Management
Compliance	AWS CloudHSM	Azure Trust Center	Google Cloud Platform Security

Key Takeaways!

The differences between the three major cloud services can be seen by evaluating them using different parameters such as compute, storage, databases, locations and documentation.

• Compute: AWS offers the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that handles all compute services by managing virtual machines that have preconfigured settings and can also be configured by the users as required. On the other hand, Azure offers Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine scale sets while GCP provides the Google Compute Engine (GCE) which performs the same functions.
• Storage: Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is the best option for storage with extensive documentation, tried and tested technology with proper community support. Microsoft Azure Storage and Google Cloud Storage also offer reliable storage services.
• Databases: Multiple tools and service options pertaining to databases are offered by all the major service providers. Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) supports major databases such as Oracle and PostgreSQL and manages everything from updating to patching. Azure SQL database offers SQL database handling features for Azure, while it is Cloud SQL for GCP.
• Location: AWS, Azure and GCP offer great coverage across the world and ensure peak application performance by having the least possible route to the intended customer base. While Amazon has 77 availability zones, Azure has a presence in 60+ regions and Google in 33 countries, with newer regions being added regularly.
• Documentation: All three vendors offer high-quality documentation though AWS is slightly ahead of Azure and GCP.

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Primary source: veritis.com