AWS vs Azure vs GCP: the big three Cloud Services face to face.

In a multicloud world that is
dominated by the big three providers – Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and
Microsoft Azure – why choose a single
Cloud provider when you can enjoy everything they offer?

Broader and
more varied products are increasingly made available to us, but they all are high quality services with excellent
availability, top-notch security and
high performance, so they are going to allow us to meet any need we might
have.

Of course, they differ in name,
price, technology and how they are grouped within each platform. We are going
to compare the services of the big three public clouds to see which one is
better for us.

LIST OF CATEGORIES

Computing
Storage
Databases
Networks & Connectivity
Cloud management & control tools
Segurity
Developer tools
Big Data & Analytics
Machine learning and AI
IoT, Blockchain and others

Computing

A basic cloud service is
computing or processing capacity. All ‘big three’ offer different types of instances based both on Windows
and Linux, with GPUs or with big-size, high-performance configurations.

They each already have their own
managed Kubernetes and Serverless services. In the first case, Kubernetes Engine stands out because of its level of
readiness.

Lambda stands out in the second
case because of the same reason and also because it allows a bigger number of
languages to be used (Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python, and Ruby).

Some of the most notable
computing services that have been launched recently are AWS Outposts, which
allows Amazon’s cloud technology to be used on the client’s premises (on-prem),
and GKE On-Prem, which allows Kubernetes Engine to be used in data centres.null

IaaS: deployment, management and maintenance of virtual servers

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

• Azure Virtual Machines

• Compute Engine

Platform-as-a-Service

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Elastic Beanstalk

• App Service

• Cloud Services

• App Engine Standard Environment

• App Engine Flexible Environment

Virtual private servers

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Lightsail

• Virtual Machine Images

Managed container service

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• EC2 Container Service (ECS)

  Managed Kubernetes service

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS)

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

• Kubernetes Engine

Docker container logging

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• EC2 Container Registry (ECR)

• Azure Container Registry

• Container Registry

Serverless containers, without cluster or server management

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Fargate

• Container Instances

A managed service for deploying and orchestrating microservice-based applications

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Service Fabric

• App Engine

Serverless

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Lambda

• Functions

• Cloud Functions

Batch computing

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS Batch

• Azure Batch

Automatic instance escalation

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS Auto Scaling

• Virtual Machine Scale Sets

• App Service Scale Capability (PAAS)

• AutoScaling

• Instance Groups

Local cloud infrastructure

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS Outposts

• GKE On-Prem

Storage

Another essential cloud
functionality is storage capacity. Given that it pioneered S3 (Single Storage Service), AWS is the best known
out of the three cloud providers, but all three provide a wide range of highly
reliable services that cover all storage types: object-based, filed-based, disks for instances, backup, etc.

All three have services for uploading
large volumes of data to the cloud, where devices are sent to the premises of
the client in order for it to copy its data therein and then return said
devices to the data centre in order for the data to be uploaded faster and with
added security.

The biggest, most spectacular of
these services is Snowmobile, where an Amazon truck measuring almost 20m in
length drives to all of the client’s premises for the data. On the other hand, the only service with disaster recovery capabilities is
Microsoft Azure.

Although it depends on the type
of storage, the amount of stored data and the region, as a general rule it can
be said that Azure’s services are cheaper than Google Cloud’s, and that Google
Cloud’s services are cheaper than AWS’.

Object storage

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Simple Storage Services (S3)

• Blob Storage

• Google Cloud Storage

Storage for archiving

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• S3 Infrequent Access (IA)

• Glacier

• Storage (Cool)

• Storage (Archive)

• Nearline

• Coldline

Disk for instances

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Elastic Block Store (EBS)

• Disk Storage

• Persistent Disk

File storage

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Elastic Block Store (EBS)

• Disk Storage

• Cloud Filestore

Solutions for uploading large amounts of data to the cloud

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS DataSync

• Snowball Edge

• Snowmobile

• Import/Export

• Azure Data Box

• Storage Transfer Service

Backup

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Glacier

• Storage Gateway

• Azure Backup

• Coldline

Hybrid storage

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Storage Gateway

• StorSimple

Disaster Recovery

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Site Recovery

Databases

Naturally, the range of databases
that are available on the cloud is quite wide: relational databases, NoSQL, caches, data warehouses, etc.

The only relational database
engines supported by Google Cloud are MySQL and PostgreSQL. In addition to
these two, Azure supports MariaDB and SqlServer, whereas AWS supports Oracle on
top of all of the former.

Google Cloud stands out in
particular because of BigQuery.

Only Azure and AWS provide graph-
and service-based databases for migrating and replicating databases.

Relational databases

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• RDS

• Amazon Aurora

• SQL Database

• Cloud SQL

• Cloud Spanner

NoSQL: document storage

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• DynamoDB

• Azure Cosmos DB

• Cloud Datastore

• Cloud Bigtable

NoSQL: key-value storage

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• DynamoDB

• SimpleDB

• Table Storage

• Cloud Datastore

Cache Storage

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• ElastiCache

• Azure Redis Cache

• Cloud Memorystore

Database migration

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Database Migration Service

• Azure Database Migration Service

Managed Data warehouse

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Redshift

• SQL Data Warehouse

• Big Query

Graph databases

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Neptune

• Azure Cosmos DB

Networks & connectivity

This is one of the categories where all three providers are more or less on a par. There are, however, significant differences in the technologies each provider uses or how they meet every need.

But all three of them allow us to manage the networks in our infrastructure from the cloud, create subnetworks, use load balancers, perform NAT, set up a firewall, create a VPN, set up dedicated connections with a corporate data centre and create a CDN.

Isolated virtual network environments

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Virtual Private Cloud

• Virtual Network

• Virtual Private Cloud

Connection with on-prem environments

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS Managed VPN

• VPN Gateway

• Cloud VPN

Administered DNS for managing names and records

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Route 53

• Azure DNS

• Google Cloud DNS

Redirection of incoming traffic to improve performance and reliability

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Traffic Manager

Global content delivery network

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• CloudFront

• Content Delivery Network

• Cloud CDN

Dedicated, private network for connecting the cloud and local environments

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Direct Connect

• ExpressRoute

• Cloud Interconnect

Load balancing: incoming traffic is automatically distributed

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Elastic Load Balancing

• Load Balancer

• Cloud Load Balancing

Cloud management and control tools

This section includes a few
utilities that facilitate monitoring, billing, traceability, managing the
infrastructure as code and applying good practices.

These are functionalities that
provide the other services with more cohesion and allow each Cloud to behave
like a platform.

Cloud consultancy capabilities

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Trusted Advisor

• Azure Advisor

• Cloud Platform Security

Resource procurement and orchestration

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• OpsWorks (Chef-based)

• CloudFormation

• Azure Automation

• Resource Manager

• VM extensions

1. Cloud Deployment Manager
   Cloud resource monitoring and administration

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• CloudWatch

• X-Ray

• Management Console

• Azure Portal

• Azure Monitor

• Azure Application Insights

• Stackdriver Monitoring

• Cloud Shell

• Debugger

• Trace

• Error Reporting

Billing

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Usage and Billing

• Azure Billing API

• Stackdriver Monitoring

• Cloud Billing

Administration

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Application Discovery Service

• Systems Manager

• Personal Health Dashboard

• Log Analytics

• Operations Management Suite

• Resource Health

• Storage Explorer

• Cloud Console

User activity and API usage monitoring

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• CloudTrail

• Log Analytics

• Audit logging within Azure Monitor

• Cloud Audit Logging

Evaluation of the status of workloads compared to AWS-recommended architecture-related practices

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Well-Architected Tool

Security

When these providers say they
offer better security than that which can be achieved on the premises, they do
it based on all the time, effort and money they have invested in their own
physical and logical security.

They put this investment at the
service of their clients’ in each of their products. Furthermore, they provide
a series of additional services for setting up the security of our applications
and data according to our needs and the level of security we desire.

Identities are managed via IAM
and, even though Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are strongly focused from a
native point of view on G Suite and Active Directory respectively, all three
providers provide mulit-platform integration solutions.

With Google Cloud’s recent addition
– Cloud Armor, all three providers now provide a DDoS attack protection
service.

Authentication & authorisation

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Identity and Access Management (IAM)

• Organizations

• Active Directory

• Active Directory Premium

• Cloud IAM

• Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy

Information protection

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Azure Information Protection

Encryption

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS Key Management Service

• CloudHSM

• Key Vault

• Cloud Key Management Service

Firewall

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Web Application Firewall

• Application Gateway

Security assessment

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Inspector

• Security Center

Certificate administration

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Certificate Manager

• App Service Certificates

Directory services

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS Directory Service

• Active Directory Domain Services

Identity administration

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Cognito

• Azure Active Directory B2C

Multi-factor authentication

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Multi-Factor Authentication

• Multi-Factor Authentication

• Multi-Factor Authentication

Threat and anomalous activity detection

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• GuardDuty

• AWS Macie

• Azure Advanced Threat Protection

• Cloud Security Command Center (Cloud Security Scanner, Cloud Data Loss Prevention API)

Regulatory compliance

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Artifact

• Service Trust Portal

Protection against DDoS attacks

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS Shield

• DDoS Protection Service

• Cloud Armor

Developer tools

Today we have all the necessary
tools to build, deploy, diagnose, debug and manage all kinds of scalable services
and applications in multi-platform mode.

This broad and varied range of
services seem to be aimed at encouraging us to make the cloud our development
environment. They range from the most typical
(code repositories, construction tools, deployment managers) to the most
specific (queuing, messaging, API management or search engine services).

As of today, all three providers
have their own service mesh infrastructure layer available. Curiously enough, Google Cloud does not have an email messaging service
integrated in its platform and instead proposes using the services from third
parties.

Video streaming services, including diverse transcoding technologies

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Elastic Transcoder

• Media Services

Creation and optimization of workflows among applications, data and devices anywhere

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Simple Workflow Service (SWF)

• Logic Apps

API Management

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• API Gateway

• API Management

• Cloud Endpoints

• Apigee Api Management

Testing of applications in devices

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Device Farm

• AppCenter

• Cloud Endpoints

• Cloud Test Lab

Git Repositories

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS Source Repositories

• Azure Source Repositories

• Cloud Source Repositories

Building of applications and artefacts

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• CodeBuild

• Visual Studio Team Services

• Cloud Build

Command line interface

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Command Line Interface

• Command Line Interface (CLI)

• PowerShell

• Cloud Tools for Powershell

• Cloud SDK

Predefined templates

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Quick Start

• Quickstart Templates

Code repositories

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• CodeCommit

• Azure Repos

• Cloud Source Repositories

Application deployment

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• CodeDeploy

• CodePipeline

• Azure DevOps

• Azure Pipelines

Collection of application development tools

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Developer Tools

• Developer Tools

Collection of application development tools

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amplify

• Mobile Apps

• Xamarin Apps

Mobile app analysis

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Mobile Analytics

• HockeyApp

• Application Insights

Email services

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Simple Email Service (SES)

  Queuing services

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Simple Queue Service (SQS)

• Azure Queue Storage

• Cloud Pub/Sub

Managed Apache MQ service

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon MQ

  Notification services

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Simple Notification Service (SNS)

• Notification Hubs

• Firebase Cloud Messaging

Payment services

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon Dev Pay

• Google Pay API

Implementation of backend processes by connecting applications, data and devices locally or on the cloud

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS Step Functions

• Logic Apps

Service mesh

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• App Mesh

• Service Fabric Mesh

• Istio

Apache Lucene-based scalable search service

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Elasticsearch Service

  Administered search service

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• CloudSearch

• Azure Search

Big Data & Analytics

On-demand usage – one of the
cloud’s main characteristics – is of particular relevance here. How much money should we invest to deploy a Hadoop or Spark cluster?

All three platforms provide
managed services that allow us to turn on the cluster when we are going to use
it and to turn it off when we do not need it.

And, besides that, they provide
tools for data streaming, orchestration, display and so on.

A Hadoop- and/or Apache Spark-based platform for analysing large amounts of data

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon EMR

• Azure Databricks

• HDInsight

• Cloud Dataproc

Data stream ingestion and processing platforms

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon Kinesis

• Stream Analytics

• Data Lake Store

• Análisis con Azure Data Lake

• Pub/Sub

Data Streaming

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Kinesis Data Firehose

• Kinesis Data Streams

• Event Hubs

A managed service for storing business data and looking them up by means of standard SQL

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon Athena

• Análisis con Azure Data Lake

• BigQuery

Data workflow orchestration

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Data Pipeline

• AWS Glue

• Data Factory

• Data Catalog

• Cloud Composer

Display

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• QuickSight

• PowerBI

• Data Studio

Machine Learning & AI

This is probably the category
which more services have been added to and has grown the most in the past few
years.

Apart from managed services, many
easy-and-ready-to-use services have been added. Google Cloud’s APIs stand out
because of their readiness level.

A machine learning managed service

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• SageMaker

• Azure Machine Learning Studio

• Servicio Azure Machine Learning

• Cloud Machine Learning Engine

Voice recognition and conversation UI

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon Lex

• Bing Speech API

• Speaker Recognition API

• Dialogflow Enterprise Edition

Text-to-voice

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon Polly

• Bing Speech API

• Text-To-Speech

Vision

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon Rekognition

• Computer Vision

• Face API

• Emotions API

• Cloud Vision

Natural language processing

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon Comprehend

• Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS)

• Cloud Natural Language

Translation

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon Translate

• Translator Text

• Cloud Translation

Video

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon Rekognition Video

• Video API

• Cloud Video Intelligence

Personal assistant services

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Alexa Skills Kits

• Azure AI

• Bot Framework

• Actions on Google

An automated ML service

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Cloud AutoML

IoT, Blockchain and others

All three providers have their own IoT platform (this particular battle has not been won yet) and marketplace. Apart from this, they provide gaming, VR and AR services.

The blockchain services AWS has launched are particularly interesting because they keep you isolated from the difficulties of setting up your own network.

IoT

A service for connecting and supervising IoT devices

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS IoT Core

• Azure IoT Hub

• Cloud IoT Core

A managed service for providing devices with edge computing capabilities

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS Greengrass

• Azure IoT Edge

Remote device administration

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS IoT Device Management

• Azure IoT Hub Device Management

Event detection and response

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS IoT Events

• Event Grid

Blockchain

A managed service for creating Hyperledger Fabric- and Ethereum-based scalable blockchain networks

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon Managed Blockchain

  A fully administered accounting database providing a transparent, immutable transaction ledger that can be verified by encryption

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon Quantum Ledger Database

Others

A marketplace open to third-party products and services

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• AWS Marketplace

• Azure Marketplace

• GCP Marketplace

A comprehensive communication, email and document business suite

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• WorkMail

• WorkDocs

• Chime

• Office 365

• Gsuite

Managed services for hosting gaming servers

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• GameLift

• PlayFab

A game engine

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Lumberyard

  Augmented reality and virtual reality services

AWS

AZURE

GCP

• Amazon Sumerian