By Tushar Agarwal, Senior Solution Architect, Global Cloud Practice, GlobalLogic India
Public cloud has broken through the mainstream enterprise consciousness in the last few years. Even for enterprises not betting it all on cloud, cloud adoption is an integral part of most enterprises’ infrastructure strategy.
Each of the popular cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offer various foundational services while also providing some unique services, especially in the NoSQL, Big Data, Analytics and ML.This article attempts to analyze the different services and delivery models available by popular public cloud providers. It aims to help business decision makers choose the right cloud fit who are planning to invest in Public Cloud Services.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
AWS is the oldest public cloud provider with the widest range of products, compute and data storage options and managed services.They have a strong focus on security and architecture best practices throughtheir enterprise frameworks such as the Well-Architected Framework and Cloud Adoption Framework. AWS is also betting on Micro-VMs (Firecracker) and serverless.They have lately realigned their focus towards hybrid cloud, and have announced offerings such as Outpostsin partnership with VMware. AWS also recently acquired CloudEndure to bolster its cloud migration toolchain.
When to choose AWS
AWS is a great choice for startups and enterprises alike. When it comes to compute, AWS provides the widest range of VM types.Block storage comes with a variety of options and does not restrict IOPS by volume size.
AWS supports managed databases for most major open source and commercial databases. In addition, Aurora is their own PAYG SQL database offering that boasts Oracle like performance.
AWS is a proponent of and provides a range of purpose-built NoSQL databases. These include, DynamoDB (key value and document) and Neptune (Graph).
AWS has built out its networking services portfolio over the last decade. AWS provides a managed NAT gateway, VPN Gateway, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect Gateway, Client VPN service etc.
For security, AWS has launched managed services for DDoS protection (AWS Shield) and Web Application Firewall (WAF), along with AWS Inspector, AWS Config and CloudTrail for inventory and policy management and auditing. GuardDuty provides threat detection.Macie provides an AI driven data loss prevention (DLP).
All in all AWS provides a breadth and depth of services and features that are suitable for a substantial number of enterprises.
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft initially focused on SaaS and PaaS offerings as its strengths lie in both enterprise and consumer software. Over time, Microsoft expanded focus to both Linux and IaaS services. Microsoft has also made Azure more startup friendly and built out API support for its various services.
When to choose Azure
Azure may be a preferred platform for customers that are already using Microsoft products in some way. While Azure supports a number of open source product based services, the Microsoft portfolio on cloud is what sets it apart for customers.
Azure is the cloud to chooseif you have existing licenses for windows OS, MS-SQL and want to bring them to cloud (BYOL) via Microsoft License Mobility Program. License costs form a substantial part of infrastructure expenses, and will be a major consideration for customers who run large deployments of MS-SQL etc.
Azure was also the first to recognize the trend towards hybrid cloud, and had one of the first hybrid cloud offering (Azure Stack). Other cloud players are only now catching up with Azure in this space.
When it comes to NoSQL databases, CosmosDB provides multi-model, globally distributed NoSQL database with multiple consistency models. If you need to run multiple managed data models, including document, graph, key-value, table, and column-family data models in a single cloud, Cosmos may be the way to go.
In addition to PAYG billing model, customers with existing enterprise accounts may pre-purchase Azure subscriptions as part of their annual renewals. This prevents the uncertainty and additional mid-year budget approvals that are usually associated with PAYG models.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
According to Synergy Research Group report, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has the smallest market share of the public cloud providerscompared here (about 6%), but is showing a robust growth. GCP is also looking at not only new customers, but also early cloud adopters who are looking to expand their landscape to Google as part of a multi-cloud strategy.Google boasts the lowest list price on infrastructure compared to all the other cloud providers.
When to choose GCP
Google allows users to create their own custom sizes so that customers can match their cloud workloads sizing to their on-prem sizing. GCP also bills customers based on the total CPU and memory used, rather than individual VMs. This reduces billing and capacity waste.
Google was also a leader in per-second billing, which forced other Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) to follow suit. This results in up to a 40% savings overall, compared to relying on standard VM t-shirt sizes and per hour billing.
VM startup times in GCP are phenomenally fast, and leave other CSPs in the dust. This makes scaling out especially responsive.
Networking is where GCP shines with a global low latency network. Other CSPs limit VPC networks to a region. This makes is easy for GCP customers to build applications that serve customers globally, without building complex cross region infrastructure design and data replication mechanisms.
For customers who want a globally distributed database that still supports immediate consistency and ACID properties, GCP has built Spanner. Spanner uses consensus algorithms and atomic clocks to synchronize transactions between nodes.
GCP has a product called BigTable. BigTable is a petabyte scale NoSQL database that is used by Google in its own products such as Gmail.
From a billing perspective, GCP provides sustained use discounts that automatically reduce the PAYG rate beyond certain thresholds.
Future Outlook
Each cloud has features and advantages that appeal to specific customer needs. While all the cloud providers will continue to provide certain common services, each CSP will continue to build out unique, differentiated services that are purpose built to solve very specific customer needs. CSPs hope that this will increase customer stickiness and create a lock in effect.
From a customer perspective, these services will also become a driver to adopt a multi-cloud strategy. Specific requirements might drive them to mix and match services across cloud platforms, to meet their application’s requirements. Customers will likely use one cloud as their primary platform, while using services from others for specific applications.
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