The public cloud market consists of many cloud providers. Amazon, Microsoft and Google account for 62% of the total cloud market in 2022. The remaining public cloud market is split between IBM, Alibaba, Oracle and several smaller players. This article examines cloud offerings from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
1.AWS
AWS, shown in Figure 1, is one of the largest cloud providers. The AWS cloud consists of more than 200 individual services and generates more than $70 billion in revenue per year, according to research from Dgtl Infra.
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Amazon does not provide a standardized availability commitment or service level agreement (SLA) for the entire AWS cloud, but rather provides SLAs for each individual service. In the case of EC2, Amazon’s platform for hosting VM instances, Amazon offers a region-level SLA of 99.99% and an instance-level SLA of 99.5% . The company offers a tiered system of service credits, where the percentage of service credit is tied to the duration of an outage, with longer outages qualifying for higher service credits.
Regions and areas
One of the most important considerations when evaluating a cloud provider is the number of global regions and availability zones offered. Amazon currently consists of 27 regions around the world and has a total of 87 Availability Zones.
Interface
Another important factor when selecting a public cloud are options for interacting with cloud resources. Cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google make SDKs available to developers so that applications can more easily use cloud resources. From an administrative point of view, the various cloud providers offer both a web portal and a command line interface (CLI). Amazon’s management portal for AWS is shown in Figure 1. The command-line environment, called the AWS CLI, can be installed on Windows, macOS, or Linux. Although the supported commands largely resemble those used in Linux environments, Amazon also offers a PowerShell version of the AWS CLI.
Pricing
Like competing clouds, Amazon uses a pay-as-you-go model for its AWS cloud resources. The formulas used to calculate usage costs are quite complex, but Amazon offers a price calculator that can help determine overall costs. Amazon also makes some resources available in a free tier. These free tier resources tend to be useful for those who want to learn how different AWS services work without investing a lot of money.
2.Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure, shown in Figure 2, is widely considered the second largest cloud in the world. According to research by Dgtl Infra, Microsoft generates more than $90 billion in revenue from its cloud services; However, these revenues are tied not only to Azure, but also to cloud services such as Microsoft 365.
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Like AWS, Microsoft has a separate SLA for each individual service in its Azure cloud. Microsoft’s uptime guarantee for Azure VMs is very similar to Amazon’s SLA. Virtual machines consisting of at least two instances and deployed in two Availability Zones are guaranteed to have 99.99% availability. This drops to 99.95% availability if the instances are in the same Availability Zone. The SLA for single instance VMs varies by hardware configuration, but all VM instances are guaranteed to have at least 95% uptime. Like Amazon, Microsoft offers credits when SLAs are not met.
Regions and areas
Microsoft manages many regions and Availability Zones in the Azure cloud. These Availability Zones are separate data centers within a region, with in-region round-trip latency of less than 2 milliseconds. Microsoft currently offers 27 regions that each support multiple Availability Zones. In total, there are 60 regions and 116 Availability Zones.
Interface
The Microsoft Azure portal, shown in Figure 2, is relatively easy to navigate, and most Azure services and resources can be managed from the portal without having to dive into the command-line environment. For those who prefer to use a command-line environment, Microsoft offers Azure CLI. Like the Amazon CLI, the Azure CLI can be installed on Windows, Linux, or macOS. There is also an option to run Azure CLI in Docker or in Azure Cloud Shell. Like the AWS CLI, the Azure CLI uses Linux-style commands. Microsoft also offers Azure PowerShell, which is basically a PowerShell module that can be used to manage Azure resources from a PowerShell session.
Pricing
Microsoft claims that “AWS is up to five times more expensive than Azure for Windows Server and SQL Server.” Microsoft further states that running Windows VMs on Azure can generate up to 71% cost savings compared to running these VMs on AWS EC2. The company makes similar claims on SQL Managed Instances and SQL Server Virtual Machines with savings of 85% and 45%, respectively. Ultimately, the amount paid depends on several factors. Microsoft provides a pricing calculator to estimate the cost of running various workloads on Azure.
3.Google Cloud
The Google Cloud, shown in Figure 3, is the third largest cloud platform and generates over $20 billion in revenue each year based on Dgtl Infra research.
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Like Microsoft and Amazon, Google ties its SLAs to specific services. In the case of Google Compute Engine, a single instance is guaranteed to have an availability greater than 99.5%. This number increases to 99.99% for instances in multiple zones or for load-balanced instances. Google also offers financial credit in the event of non-compliance with its SLAs.
Regions and areas
Google has an impressive number of data centers in the Asia-Pacific region, North America, South America, Europe, and the Middle East. Together, these elements represent the company’s 34 Regions and 103 Availability Zones. There are approximately three dozen Availability Zones in North America alone.
Interface
In addition to the web portal shown above, Google offers a command-line environment called gcloud CLI. It supports Linux-style commands and can be installed on Linux, macOS, or Windows. Downloads are also available for Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Fedora, and CentOS.
Pricing
Google offers the same type of pay-as-you-go pricing as other providers. Those who want to try Google Cloud can receive up to $300 in free credits and access over 20 products within Google Cloud. Since cloud pricing tends to be complex, Google provides a pricing calculator that can estimate what it will cost to run various workloads in Google Cloud.
