Introduction
The latest report of garner released in 2021 anticipated that spending on global cloud services would reach nearly 500Bn$. Cloud Computing plays a prominent role for businesses which rely on data.
AWS, Azure, Google and Alibaba are some of the top cloud service providers. In this blog, let us find out the differences between them and comparison among AWS, GCP, Alibaba and Azure.
Compute
The majority of the service providers compute Kubernetes and Docker, support Linux, Windows, VMWare, and dedicated host services.
- AWS: Amazon provides flagship services like Elastic Compute Cloud, also called EC2. It offers a wide range of features like supporting Linux, Windows, GPU instances, and auto-scaling. AWS also offers batch computing jobs, a virtual private cloud option known as a light sail, and supports Kubernetes, Docker and its service called Fargate, which automates servers and cluster management. Complete AWS Training in Hyderabad and explore a wide range of opportunities in AWS.
- Azure: Microsoft’s Azure or Virtual Machines is a cloud-based service. Virtual Machine is an auto-scaling mechanism with two container services that depend on Kubernetes. It has cloud services and batch services for scalable web applications, and AWS elastic beanstalk also provides these types of similar services. It also provides a year of free service for 750 hours per month of Windows or Linux BS1VM. Its Service Fabric is a unique feature specially designed for microservices architecture.
- Google: Google Cloud Platform or GCP’s primary service is computing engine. Google Compute is relatively smaller than other competitors like AWS, Azure, Alibaba, etc. it provides services similar to AWS and Azure, like compatibility with Kubernetes and offers microservices and containers. Its Compute Engine contains predefined Machine and customized types, Linux and Windows support, a per-second billing plan, and is carbon-neutral in nature, reducing energy usage. It also offers a free trial for up to 12 months but with limited features.
- Alibaba: Alibaba Cloud platform focuses on small and medium businesses in China and Asia, serving enterprises, making it one of the prominent providers in the Asian continent. It is gradually increasing its footprints all over the world. The services include web hosting, container services for Kubernetes, auto-scaling, and batch computing, which all the cloud service providers provide. Some unique features like Alibaba ECS and ECS bare metal instances are customized features which Alibaba provides.
Storage
Almost all the service providers except Alibaba provide similar storage capacities per your requirements.
- AWS: users can set up an amazon storage gateway quickly, and the best service providers cover nearly 32% of the market share. Amazon offers a wide range of service providers in storage services like Simple Storage Service (S3), virtual server disks, elastic block store, cloud storage etc. Its storage gateway provides a hybrid storage environment. It does not provide Archive storage, site recovery service, or backup service.
- Azure: Azure provides Blob storage/ premium storage for its customers. For big data applications, Data Lake and queue storage for huge volumes of workloads. It provides the services which are not provided by AWS, like Archive storage, actual backup and Site recovery.
- Google: GCP provides a persistent disk option and unified object storage service. Cloud Spanner storage service supports SQL-based services. It also offers Transfer of appliances like AWS Snowball. It does not provide archive and backup services.
- Alibaba: Its storage services are very limited when compared to other providers. It provides NAS storage, object storage archive and black storage.
Pricing
In the pricing category GCP is better when compared with others.
- AWS: AWS provides a pricing calculator on its site, and pricing is occult. Users can calculate pricing according to their needs. According to third-party services, the introductory pricing, which includes 8GB RAM will cost around 69$/month.
- Azure: The introductory pricing of Azure will cost you around USD 70 per month for 8GB of RAM. a bit slightly higher than AWS. for 3.89TB of RAM it goes up to USD 7/ hour.
- Google: GCP is the leader in pricing as it’s cheaper than the others for 8GB RAM it costs around USD 52/ month. For 3.75 TB of RAM, it costs around 5.32 USD/ hour.
- Alibaba: The basic pricing of 8GB RAM costs around USD 60/month. Pricing varies with additional features.
Database
All the service providers provide Regional Database Management and non-Regional Database Management, Time series Database, In-Memory Data Store and Data warehouse features. In this feature Amazon is the leader with more features.
- AWS: In addition, it provides Graph database called Neptune.
- Azure: It offers a Table storage service which is not offered by any competitors.
- Google: It does not provide MongoDB but offers cloud firestore.
- Alibaba: Alibaba will soon implement GraphDB services.
AI / ML
All the competitors provide ML service, and image recognition features. Speech, language recognition, business analysis, machine learning and intelligent search services are not offered by Alibaba, and here google and amazon are the best choice.
Business productivity
In business productivity, you can go for Azure as it offers better services than other providers.
IoT
All the service providers provide IoT Platform service. AWS and Azure are the top pics as they provide more services than others. Know detailed review of Aws vs azure.
Let us look at some of the top companies that rely on cloud services-
- AWS – Netflix, Facebook, BBC, Baidu etc
- GCP- Verizon, linked in, news corp, etc.
- Azure- being, Samsung, eBay, etc
- Alibaba- Air Asia, ford, hp, etc.
Conclusion
Cloud computing services are increasing. Generally, companies choose the cloud providers depending on their infrastructure, need and adoption to update. If your entire system runs on Windows, Azure is the best, so you need not update or upgrade any of your settings.
For Web-based startups, Google is their better choice as its services are more integrated. Choose AWS if you want worldwide connectivity and high reach. Alibaba is growing rapidly by adding new services to its customers and is popular in China and Asian countries.
