Compute Compared: AWS vs Azure vs Google Compute

Cloud computing has come a long way and it brought a major shift in how traditional data centers were hosted and managed. Cloud computing market is full of numerous cloud providers – AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba and so on. Cloud computing has revolutionized the way organizations work and led to benefits such as decreased Capex, reduction in infrastructure maintenance, increased availability, scalability, security etc.

Today we look more in detail about compute services offered by the big three cloud providers – AWS, Azure and Google compute, and understand key differences between them.

AWS Compute

AWS cloud services offering date back to the year 2006, it has services Amazon S3 cloud storage and elastic compute cloud (EC2). Some of the major AWS cloud customers are Expedia, Netflix, Coinbase, Coca cola, Airbnb etc.

AWS Elastic compute cloud (EC2) handles all computing services by managing virtual machines which have preconfigured settings and custom configurations as per user requirements. It is scalable vertically or horizontally to handle user needs, provides multi utility services , compute resources can be provisioned from a wide range of categories and duration services required, it can utilize Ethernet speeds up to 100 Gps.

Compute base of AWS comprises 25 geographical regions with 81 availability zones. 218+ edge locations, 12 regional edge caches.

Azure Compute

It is the second largest cloud platform year 2010 as its starting it has 200 products and services. It provides windows based and open source languages , technologies, and platforms support. Some of its prominent customers are Asos, McKesson group, HSBC, Starbucks, Walgreens, HP, 3M etc.

Azure compute includes virtual machines, virtual machine scale sets, functions for serverless computing, batch for containerized batch workloads, service fabric for microservices and container orchestration, and cloud services to build cloud-based apps and APIs.

Azure site recovery service enables organizations of all sizes to orchestrate site-to-site replication and data recovery to VM hosted environments. It gives Zone redundant storage (ZRS) or data storage redundancy across multiple data centres.

Compute base of Azure comprises of 60+ regions with a minimum three availability zones in each region with more than 116 edge locations

Google Compute

Google cloud was made available publically in the year 2010. It offers services spanning across computing, networking, big data etc. Some of its notable customers are Toyota, Unilever, Spotify, The Home Depot, Target, Twitter etc.

Google provides Google compute engine (GCE) to perform computing functions. It is an IaaS component of GCP. It is built on global infrastructure hosting Google search engine, Gmail, YouTube, and other big data services. Virtual machines running on google cloud data centres connected worldwide with fiber networks. Virtual machines can be launched on demand.

Compute base of Google comprises of 27 cloud regions with 82 zones and 146 edge locations

Comparison: AWS vs Azure vs GCP Compute

The key points of differences between the three compute services are:

Compute Instance

AWS: Compute services are offered via EC2 (Elastic compute). The RAM, CPU, storage capabilities differ on purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized, storage optimized and so on.
Azure: Compute services are offered via Azure virtual machines. The RAM , CPU and storage capabilities differ on purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized, storage optimized and so on.
GCP: Compute services are offered via Google compute engine.

PaaS

AWS: AWS Elastic Beanstalk is PaaS service.
Azure: It is an App service.
GCP: Offered via Google App engine.

Cluster Management

AWS: AWS ParallelCluster tool let deployment and management of HPC clusters on AWS.
Azure: Azure CycleCloud tool let creation, management, operation and optimization of HPC and large compute clusters of any scale.
GCP: Google HCP toolkit allows launching new HCP environments.

Containerization

AWS: Done by AWS Elastic container/ Kubernetes service.
Azure: Done by Azure Kubernetes service (AKS).
GCP: Done by Google Kubernetes engine.

Serverless Function

AWS: Serverless Function is offered via AWS Lambda.
Azure: It is an inbuilt Azure function.
GCP: It is a Google cloud function.

Also Read: AWS Lambda vs Azure Functions vs Google Cloud Functions

Comparison Table

Below table summarizes the differences between the three:

Download the comparison table: AWS vs Azure vs Google Compute

Quick facts!

Market share – Amazon web services (32%), Microsoft Azure (19%) and Google cloud (7%)