Public Cloud Platforms (under review) comparison & reviews

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Analysis expand Ronald van Vugt
 		Marius Sandbu
 		Marius Sandbu
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General expand
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  • Fully Supported
  • Limitation
  • Not Supported
  • Information Only
Pros
  • + Cloud leader with the most extensive range of services
  • + Mature services with good compliance coverage
  • + Huge number of 3rd party integrations
  • + Broad range of services
  • + Good hybrid capabilities for Microsoft based environments
  • + Rapid growth of services at competitive price
  • + Good data services and capabilities around AI/ML
Cons
  • - Evolving hybrid strategy based around VMware partnership
  • - Availability zone rollout still largely in preview.
  • - Fledgling hybrid capabilities based around Cisco partnership
  Content  
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Content Creator
Ronald van Vugt
Marius Sandbu
Marius Sandbu
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Overview
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service delivered through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers.
Google Compute Engine delivers virtual machines running in Googles data centers and worldwide fiber network. Compute Engines tooling and workflow support enable scaling from single instances to global, load-balanced cloud computing.
Management expand
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  Interfaces  
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UI / API / CL / SDK
Webbased UI, API Available, CLI Available for Windows/Mac/Linux, SDK Available for different platforms
Webbased UI, Powershell, API Available, CLI Available for Windows/Mac/Linux, SDK Available for different platforms
Webbased UI, API Available, CLI Available for Windows/Mac/Linux, SDK Available for different platforms, Cloud Shell
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Common API service keys
AWS Users can create their own API Access keys; these keys can be shared
Azure Users can create their own API Access keys; these keys can be shared
GCP Users can create their own API Access keys; these keys can be shared
  Monitoring  
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General Service monitoring
Every EC2 instance includes the following service quality services with a frequency of 1 minute: StatusCheckFailed, StatusCheckFailed_Instance, StatusCheckFailed_System
Every Azure Compute Instances can have basic service monitoring such as CPU, Memory and Disk utilization
Stackdriver can do in-guest and Service monitoring
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VM Service monitoring
Every EC2 instance sends basic metrics to CloudWatch every five-minutes. More metrics and one-minute monitoring are available at cost.
Every Azure instance sends basic metrics to Azure Monitor. More metrics and information can be gathered using OMS
Every GCP instance sends basic metrics to Stackdriver. More metrics and one-minute monitoring are available at cost.
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Actions / Event logging
Logging for EC2 instances is possible with the service CloudWatch Logs
Log Analytics with OMS or using Azure Monitor
Logging for GCP instances is possible with the service Stackdriver Logs
  Admin  
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Identity & Access Management
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Azure Active Directory
Google IAM access
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Multi factor authentication support
Supported
MFA support for Admins
Google 2 step authentication
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Granular Access Control
Using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) a very granular access control is possible. The default for every user and role is no access; you have to define every access control.
Resource Groups and RBAC
Google IAM access
  Control  
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VM Billing per min / hr
Pay-as-you-go, reserved instances for one or three years, scheduled instances for one year, spot instances
Pay-as-you-go, CSP, EA, Per minute billing
Pay-as-you-go, reserved instances for one or three years, Per second biling
Compute VM expand
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  VM  
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VM micro (below 1 vCPU)
EC2 instances nano, micro, small
A-series
g
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VM Small (up to 8 vCPU)
EC2 instances medium, large, xlarge,
D-series
n-standard-8
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VM Medium (up to 16 vCPU)
EC2 instances 2xlarge
L-series
n1-standard-16
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VM Large (up to 32 vCPU)
EC2 instances 4xlarge
L-series
n1-standard-32
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VM XLarge (up to 64 vCPU 128GB RAM)
EC2 instances 10xlarge
EV3-series
n1-standard-64
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VM XXLarge (up to 128 vCPU 2TB RAM)
EC2 instance 32xlarge
M-series
No
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GPU VM Large (up to 32 vCPU)
It is possible to add a GPU to every current generation EC2 instance
N-series
n1-standard-32
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GPU VM XLarge (up to 64 vCPU 128GB RAM)
It is possible to add a GPU to every current generation EC2 instance
No
n1-standard-64
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GPU VM XXLarge (up to 128 vCPU 2TB RAM)
It is possible to add a GPU to every current generation EC2 instance
No
No
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GPU types
Yes, with up to 16 NVIDIA Tesla® K80 GPUs, 192GB of total video memory, 40 thousand parallel processing cores yielding 70 teraflops of single precision floating point performance and over 23 teraflops of double precision floating point performance using P2 EC2 instances
NVIDIA K80, M60, P100
NVIDIA K80, AMD FirePro, Tesla P100
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Custom VM size
No
No
Yes
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Defined disk IOPS
EBS Optimized instances provided dediated storage network
Yes to a certain degree
IOPS are linked with GB size of disks
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SR-IOV support
Supported on some instance types
Yes, Accelerated Network
Yes, Intel DPDK
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Network speeds
Low, moderate, high, 10Gbps, 20Gbps.
Depending of the instance type from 450 Mbit until 20 Gbit
Low, Moderate, High, RDMA
Each core is subject to a 2 Gbits/second (Gbps) cap for peak performance. Each additional core increases the network cap, up to a theoretical maximum of 16 Gbps for each virtual machine
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Add virtual NIC
All instances in a VPC can add 1 until 14 virtual NICs, depending of the instance type (this is not possible in the EC2-Classic platform, but this platform is not recommended)
Yes
Yes
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Attached / detach block storage
It is possible to detach block storage from an unmounted volume on a EC2 instance and attach block storage to an EC2 instance
Yes
Yes, can add or deattach data disks
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Virtual dedicated cloud
Every EC2 instance will be part of a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
Yes Virtual Network
A GCP tenant has its dedicated virtual network scope
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IP reassignment
Possible with Elastic IP Addresses
Yes
Yes
  Image  
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Manual snapshots image
Can create Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from EC2 instance
Yes
Yes, you can create a persistent disk snapshot
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Scheduled snapshot image
Not available as native service
Not available as native service
No, only manually using CLI
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API / CLI Snapshot image
Available
Yes
Yes using REST API or using gcloud CLI
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Make image public / marketplace
AWS Marketplace is available to publish and sell application images
Yes Azure Marketplace
Yes images can be using privately or published in the Google Cloud Launcher
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VM import
You can import Windows and Linux VMs that use VMware ESX or Workstation, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix Xen virtualization formats.
Yes CLI or UI
Using CloudEndure
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VM export
you can export previously imported EC2 instances to VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix Xen formats.
Yes
No
  O/S  
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Windows
Amazon EC2 currently supports a variety of operating systems including: Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo Linux, Oracle Linux, and FreeBSD. 
Microsoft Azure currently supports a variety of operating systems including: Ubuntu, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo Linux, Oracle Linux, and FreeBSD. 
GCP currently supports a variety of operating systems including:  Ubuntu, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo Linux, Oracle Linux, and FreeBSD. 
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Linux
Amazon EC2 currently supports a variety of operating systems including: Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo Linux, Oracle Linux, and FreeBSD.
Microsoft Azure currently supports a variety of operating systems including: Ubuntu, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo Linux, Oracle Linux, and FreeBSD. 
GCP currently supports a variety of operating systems including:  Ubuntu, Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Fedora, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo Linux, Oracle Linux, and FreeBSD. 
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Bring your own OS
Yes, you can bring your own Microsoft license
Yes, you can bring your own Microsoft license using HUB
Yes
  Control  
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Resize existing VM
Resizing of a VM which is EBS backed supported
Yes
Yes
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VM Live Migration
If a host fails and the EC2 instance uses EBS, it is possible to start the EC2 instance on another host manually or automatically with monitoring and scripting; if an EC2 instance is installed on instance store and de host fails, the EC2 instance is lost
On host failure the vm will be auto migrated to a new host (guest monitor/restart also available)
Yes, Live migration
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metadata
Accomplished using tags
Yes