Compute, storage, databases and networking
For compute, AWS’ main offering is its EC2 instances, which can be tailored with a large number of options. It also provides related services such as Elastic Beanstalk for app deployment, the EC2 Container service, AWS Lambda and Autoscaling.Meanwhile, Azure's compute offering is centred around its Virtual Machines (VMs), with other tools such as Cloud Services and Resource Manager to help deploy applications on the cloud, and its Azure Autoscaling service.
Google's scalable Compute Engine delivers VMs in Google's data centres. They are quick to boot, come with persistent disk storage, promise consistent performance and are highly customisable depending on the needs of the customer.All three cloud providers support relational databases - that's Azure SQL Database, Amazon Relational Database Service, Redshift and Google Cloud SQL) - as well as NoSQL databases with Azure DocumentDB, Amazon DynamoDB and Google Bigtable
AWS storage includes its Simple Storage (S3), Elastic Block Storage (EBS), Elastic File System (EFS), Import/Export large volume data transfer service, Glacier archive backup and Storage Gateway, which integrates with on-premise environments.Microsoft’s offerings include its core Azure Storage service, Azure Blob block storage, as well as Table, Queue and File storage. It also offers Site Recovery, Import Export and Azure Backup.All three typically offer excellent networking capabilities with automated server load balancing and connectivity to on-premise systems.
Pricing
Pricing can be a huge attraction for those considering a move to the cloud, and with good reason: there has been a continued downward trend on prices for some time now as the big providers compete. However, making a clear comparison can be tough as all three offer slightly different pricing models, discounts and make frequent price cuts.
All vendors offer free introductory tiers, allowing customers to try their services before they buy, and typically offer credits to attract innovative startups onto their platforms as well as 'always free' tiers with strict usage limits.
For example, Google offers free usage up to 1GB of Google Cloud Datastore capacity, 28 instance hours per day for Google App Engine, one micro sentence per month for Google Compute Engine, 5 GB-months of Google Cloud Storage (regional only), 2 million Cloud Functions per month, 50GB of logs with Stackdriver for monitoring, as well as limited access to products like: Google Cloud Natural Language, Cloud Vision API, Kubernetes Engine and more.
Customers
A high-profile user base may not be the main reason for choosing your cloud provider, but it can help more cautious organisations understand how the public cloud is benefiting others in their sector.This is clearly a strong point of AWS. It has increasingly taken on large customer deals. For example, although the US Central Intelligence Agency eventually signed a contract with IBM, it awarded AWS a contract to build its private cloud in a one-off deal in 2013, which could be seen as a symbolic moment for potential buyers.
A longstanding AWS customer is Netflix, which eventually decided to shut all of its data centres in a final move to the cloud in 2016. But aside from web pioneers, AWS has been truly successful in convincing more traditional businesses to move to the cloud.UK bank HSBC has opted for Google Cloud for its analytics and machine learning capabilities. However, HSBC is taking a clear multi-cloud approach, partnering with all three providers for different workloads.
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