Understanding Cloud Platforms
Over the years,
cloud computing has gained vast popularity and has effectively become the essential strategy for companies to accelerate innovation. Cloud computing has achieved great things. While it is a significant shift from the traditional methods of doing business, cloud computing offers a great set of opportunities for organizations.
With cloud computing growing exponentially, the market for cloud platforms is flourishing with numerous service providers. Having said this, the competition for the leadership position has been mostly among three: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. These three cloud companies have excellent control over their markets, and the comparison has always been drawn as ‘AWS vs. Azure vs. Google.'
Cloud computing is the third wave of the digital revolution. – Lowell McAdam, CEO of Verizon
Detailed Understanding of ‘AWS Vs. Azure Vs. Google'
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Established in 2006, Amazon is one of the pioneers in the aggregation, compilation, and processing of big data. Consisting of a vast array of toolsets that grow exponentially, the capabilities of AWS are unmatched. At present, AWS offers IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS platforms as its core services.
Microsoft Azure
Azure is the closest competition that AWS has, with competent cloud infrastructure. Launched in 2010, Azure offers a wide range of tools, programming languages, and frameworks running in both Microsoft and Linux environments.
Google Cloud Platform
Google began its cloud platform journey in 2011 and has been able to garner an excellent grasp of the cloud industry. With its profound technical expertise and industry-leading tools, Google Cloud has drawn corporate customers.
Business Value of Cloud Adoption
Over the years, several organizations have used cloud services to streamline their processes and become more efficient. While the requirements of each business are different, there is still something for everyone with cloud computing. To ideally determine the value of the cloud and understand the benefits it brings to the table, there are various aspects that must be looked into.
Cloud computing is widely known for enabling enterprise ecosystems to perform faster, more efficiently, and with more flexibility. As a key enabling technology, its interaction with other technologies helps accelerate innovation and, as a result, increases potential business value. In addition, the cloud has created innumerable possibilities in the fields of IoT,
artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, and others.
Exploring What They Offer
Choosing between the market leaders in
cloud computing can be a difficult task. Each cloud solution comes with a wide range of features and opportunities. Therefore, it is essential that we meticulously evaluate each and every aspect before zeroing in on one cloud platform.
Pros and Cons of AWS
The dominance of the public cloud market is one of the biggest strengths of AWS. The massive scope of operations they offer is a reason for their growing popularity. With over 66 availability zones and 12 more on the way, AWS has a strong hold on worldwide hosting. Another advantage of AWS is that they offer a wide range of services, which currently stands at around 200+.
When talking about the cons, AWS's most significant disadvantage is its cost. AWS also sets default limits on resources that can vary from region to region. These resources are images, snapshots and volumes and you can only launch a limited number of instances per area.
Pros and Cons of Microsoft Azure
Even though Azure came later to the cloud market, they were able to make a noteworthy impact by repurposing their on-premise software for the cloud, in addition, with their strong focus on security, Azure was able to achieve multiple compliance certifications, all of which established Azure as the leader in IaaS security. When we talk about the advantages of Azure over AWS, the primary component that comes into play is the cost. Most of Azure's services can be purchased under the “pay-as-you-go” pricing model. This ensures better management of IT budgets as it charges users based on actual usage. This payment model requires no long-term commitments or upfront payments.
The need for expert management and maintenance is one of the prime Microsoft Azure disadvantages. Compared with AWS, their service offerings are also on the lower side.
Pros and Cons of Google Cloud
GCP has successfully made ground with its services despite being the last of the three to break into the cloud market. Their highly-specialized services in big data, machine learning, and analytics give Google an edge over the others. Their open-source integration and portability also facilitate easy collaboration.
Their lack of traditional relationships with enterprise customers is one of the most crucial downsides for GCP. In addition, fewer services and global data centers are also a big disadvantage when compared to the other two.
Detailed Comparison of Prices
The cost of network maintenance, network infrastructure maintenance, and labour are all factors in cloud computing pricing. To make a comparison, you need to think about things like virtual machines, operating systems, regions, and more.
Types of pricing available:
• On-demand pricing
• Discounted pricing
• Per second billing
• Serverless pricing
As an organization, you must compare multiple instances while choosing your cloud partner to help you save thousands of dollars.
Netflix uses Amazon EC2 instances and Kinesis data streams to handle the streaming workload for 190 countries. Netflix has been using the new AWS Graviton2-based EC2 instances that were promised in the AWS reInvent 2020 announcements. This has helped them improve their performance by 50%.
How to Choose a Cloud Platform for Your Business
While you are looking to choose a cloud platform for your business, you must pick someone who will cater to your business's requirements. To make this choice a little easier, there are certain aspects that one must look out for while opting for a cloud platform. These aspects are:
• Certifications and standards
• Technologies and service roadmaps
• Data governance and data security
• Contract, commercials, and SLAs
• Reliability and performance
• Migration support, vendor lock-in, and exit planning
Conclusion
Even though AWS stands out with its long tenure in the market, there is something unique about all the discussed cloud platforms. Therefore, aligning your business requirements with the said cloud platform is essential. This will help your business become more dynamic. Several large companies have seized the opportunity and shifted their businesses to the cloud. As many would say, cloud computing is the future.
FAQ
What Are the Cloud Services That AWS Offers?
At present, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS platforms as its core services in over 66 availability zones.
How Can Cloud Computing Benefit Businesses?
Cloud computing helps businesses cut down on many expenses. These expenses include power, cooling costs, server maintenance, upgrade costs, and software licensing. Businesses can also cut down on the cost of buying hardware that gets obsolete relatively soon.
Which Year Did Google Start Providing Cloud Platform Services?
Among the top three, Google was the last to launch its cloud services. However, they began their cloud platform journey in 2011 and managed to make up for the delay in their services.