Comparing the Leading Cloud Platforms

The adoption of cloud computing has quickly become a key driving force for businesses today. Organisations are making the switch from self-hosted infrastructure to public cloud configurations. Most of them are developing their applications directly on the cloud which allows the development team to stay focused on the product. This has resulted in the competition to heat up in the public cloud space, paving the way for the defining battle for cloud of our time, AWS vs Azure vs GCP. Today, we take a look at the three biggest vendors of cloud services and their offerings in major categories which influence enterprises.

Computing Power

Computing refers to the processing power of the cloud services. The higher the computing power, the better the performance. Also, it is worth noting that computing is directly proportional to pricing. Hence, pricing also plays a vital role in understanding the computing power of these three giants.

AWS offers Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2. It manages virtual machines which can either be configured by the user or come preconfigured for ease of use whereas, GCP offers Google Compute Engine (GCE) to do essentially the same thing. In contrast to this, Azure provides Virtual Machine Scale Sers and Virtual Machines.

All of them support containers to handle your instances more swiftly. They are easy to manage, portable, and also allow you to move them to new locations without much hassle. However, to understand which one offers the best bang for buck, you should read this cloud cost analysis.

Storage

Storage is one of the key fuctions of cloud storage. While Amazon's storage services are the longest running, GCP and Azure are also equally competent.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) has offerings that include options like Storage Gateway, Data Recovery, and Cloud Archive Storage, etc. And the other two players also offer reliable services.

Like computing power, storage also impacts pricing and can only be chosen based on the budgets you have for it.

Location Availability

When it comes to deploying your application, you have to make sure that it performs at its peak by having the lowest possible route to the intended customer base. Location availability is another important factor to consider while choosing your cloud platform.

All three of them are available around the world. While Amazon leads with 42 availability zones, GCP is just behind with 33 regions and Azure is available in 32 countries.
Whatever the numbers suggest, it must be noted the list is growing and new regions are added on a regular basis.

Database

It is advisable to read the software terms and conditions before investing in any of the cloud platforms. This is to understand how they manage data on their cloud. The database images from different platforms lets you get started easily.

Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) provides support for major databases like Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc. It manages everything from patching to updating or offering solutions to common database problems. Google lacks in providing an option to the end user. The SQL database handling is done by Azure SQL and Cloud SQL or Azure and GCP respectively.

Documentation

Lastly, documentation is another important factor which plays an important role when it comes to choosing the cloud platform for your company. AWS documentation is built from multiple inputs from people over a decade and is closely followed by Azure and GCP.

Whatever be the cloud platform of your choice, you can leverage our cloud expertise across AWS and Azure for your enterprise needs.