GOOGLE CLOUD Vs AMAZON CLOUD Vs MICROSOFT AZURE

BATTLE OF THE CLOUDS: GOOGLE CLOUD Vs AMAZON WEB SERVICES Vs MICROSOFT AZURE :-

Cloud computing, the IT paradigm, allows the users to upload the data to the cloud and pay only as per the usage. Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure are among the top cloud hosting providers in Dubai. Let us discuss and find out, the flavour of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) public cloud provided by these three giant vendors, which the user needs.

Amazon Web Services is the niche leader of the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) public cloud computing market according to the industry experts.  However, Microsoft walks away recognition and glory for closing the gap with Azure.  It is also said that Google with its Cloud Platform has made considerable strides as well.

Three years ago, according to a survey conducted in Feb 2017, AWS( Amazon Web Services) was a clear leader, meeting 92% of the required criteria for enterprise-grade IaaS public cloud providers in Dubai, whereas Microsoft was back at 75%. AWS scaled vertically to stay at 92% last year, with Microsoft leaping to 88% and Google 70%.

COMPARISION OF BLOCK, OBJECT AND FILE STORAGE ACROSS THE THREE PROVIDERS :-

As a matter of fact, each provider has their own strengths and weaknesses which basically depend on the specific use of a case. The three commonly used popular cloud storage use cases that the vendors stack up are as follows:

BLOCK STORAGE :-

The disk storage used by combining the cloud-based virtual devices is known as block storage. Each provider differentiates the block storage offerings into two categories; 1.Traditional magnetic spinning hard-drive disks 2. The newly launched solid state disks (SSD), little expensive but offers better performance. At a marginal premium customers can acquire a certain amount of guaranteed input/output per second (IOPs).  In other words, it is just an indication of how fast the storage will save new information or for that matter could read the stored information.

Amazon’s product is named Elastic Block Store (EBS). While cold HDD or Throughput Optimized  are traditional magnetic, spinning-disk offerings, General Purpose SSD are next-generation drives and Provisioned IOPS SSD, which according to Amazon are designed for latency-sensitive transactional workloads.  Managed Disks, Azure’s block storage offering comes in standard or premium with the latter based on SSDs while Persistent Disks (PDs) is offered by as Google’s version that come in a standard or SSD option.

When buying block storage, one of the most important factors worth considering is how fast you need access to the data stored on the SSD disk. As a result, the vendors guarantee to offer different rates of IOPs.  Google lead with an offer of 40,000 IOPs for reads and 30,000 for writes to its disks.

Cloud Block Storage Comparison: IOPS, Capacity, and Pricing Across AWS, Azure, and Google

• The general purpose AWS SSD offers 10,000 IOPS. With maximum IOPs up to 65,000, provisioned IOPs could offer up to 20,000 IOPs per volume.  While relatively speaking, Azure offers 5,000 IOPs, Google on the other hand not only offers the highest IOPs, but also gives customers the most choice in the size of block storage volumes. For more traditional hard-drive based storage, Google offers volume sizes ranging from 1GB to 64TB. AWS offers volumes between 500GB to 16TB. Azure offers between 1GB and 1TB volume sizes. Talking of Solid State Disks or SSDs, Google generously offers the highest level of IOPs-per-volume in HDDs, approx.. 3,000 for reads and 15,000 for writes. AWS and Azure are at 500 max IOPs per volume.  Max output ranges from Azure are 60 MBps to Google at 180 for read and 120 for write. AWS is at 500 MBps.
• Pricing have always been problematical issue (all prices are per GB/month), starting at $ 0.045 for HHD, AWS while it is $0.04 for Google and $0.03 for Azure. Depending on the size of the disk SSD starts its pricing at $0.10 in AWS, $0.17 for Google and Azure is between $0.12 and 0.14.

Hence, “Azure has the best price/performance ratio for block storage. But, for workloads that require higher IOPs, Google becomes the more cost-effective option”.

OBJECT STORAGE :-

Object storage is the service which enables the user to put a file in the cloud.  Simple Storage Service (S3) is primary object storage platform offered by Amazon Web Services, which enables Standard-Infrequent Access for cool storage and Glacier for cold storage. Google has Google Cloud Storage, GCS Nearline for cool storage and GCS Coldline for the purpose of records.  With a hot and cool option with Azure Hot and Cool Storage Blobs; customers have a choice to use the cool storage for archival data. With a 5TB object size limit each for AWS and Google, Azure offers a 500TB per account limit.  AWS and Google each publicize 99.999999999% durability for objects stored in their cloud. Azure does not publish durability service level agreements.

S3 costs $0.023 in AWS; to replicate data across multiple regions costs twice as much: $0.046, plus a $0.01 per GB transfer fee. (all prices are in GB/month) Most analogous offerings is from Google: It is a single-region storage that costs $0.02, while multi-region with free data transfer is at $0.026

• The Globally Redundant Storage read only storage for $0.046 offered by Azure which means write changes is not possible, but on the for single-region storage for $0.0184 the latter is expensive.

 “Based on these pricing scenarios, Google has the least expensive pure object storage costs, plus the free transfer of data. AWS, however, beats Google on cold storage costs.”