Public Cloud Platforms (under review) comparison & reviews

Summary
Rank
4th 1st 2nd
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Analysis expand by Ronald van Vugt
 		Marius Sandbu
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General expand
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  • Fully Supported
  • Limitation
  • Not Supported
  • Information Only
Pros
  • + Good range of hybrid capabilities (including VMware partnership)
  • + Baremetal Server options with cloud characteristics (hourly consumption)
  • + 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
Cons
  • - High performance networking, but limited capabilities
  • - Evolving hybrid strategy based around VMware partnership
  • - Availability zone rollout still largely in preview.
  Content  
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Content Creator
WhatMatrix
Ronald van Vugt
Marius Sandbu
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Overview
Bluemix delivers virtual machines running in IBM Cloud data centers backed by a global private fiber network.
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.
Management expand
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  Interfaces  
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UI / API / CL / SDK
Single UI : Various APIs / CLIs native to services. Differences between IAAS & PaaS environment
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
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Common API service keys
Multiple 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
  Monitoring  
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General Service monitoring
Available, but inconsistent IAAS & PAAS 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
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VM Service monitoring
Guest OS agent based (Nimsoft)
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
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Actions / Event logging
Limited capability (agent based)
Logging for EC2 instances is possible with the service CloudWatch Logs
Log Analytics with OMS or using Azure Monitor
  Admin  
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Identity & Access Management
Centralised IAM
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Azure Active Directory
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Multi factor authentication support
Only for IAAS
Supported
MFA support for Admins
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Granular Access Control
Configurable access control to IAAS
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
  Control  
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VM Billing per min / hr
Hourly / Monthly / Subscription
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
Compute VM expand
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  VM  
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VM micro (below 1 vCPU)
1vCPU minimum
EC2 instances nano, micro, small
A-series
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VM Small (up to 8 vCPU)
Available : Configurable mem up to 64GB
EC2 instances medium, large, xlarge,
D-series
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VM Medium (up to 16 vCPU)
Available : Configurable mem up to 128GB
EC2 instances 2xlarge
L-series
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VM Large (up to 32 vCPU)
Available : Configurable mem up to 242GB
EC2 instances 4xlarge
L-series
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VM XLarge (up to 64 vCPU 128GB RAM)
Max 56 core with mem up to 242GB
EC2 instances 10xlarge
EV3-series
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VM XXLarge (up to 128 vCPU 2TB RAM)
Not available as VM (Baremetal option : per Month)
EC2 instance 32xlarge
M-series
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GPU VM Large (up to 32 vCPU)
Not available as VM (Baremetal option : per Hr / Month)
It is possible to add a GPU to every current generation EC2 instance
N-series
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GPU VM XLarge (up to 64 vCPU 128GB RAM)
Not available as VM (Baremetal option : per Hr / Month)
It is possible to add a GPU to every current generation EC2 instance
No
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GPU VM XXLarge (up to 128 vCPU 2TB RAM)
No generally available Baremetal option
It is possible to add a GPU to every current generation EC2 instance
No
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GPU types
Nvidia Tesla P100, M60, K80, Grid K2 (monthly & hourly options)
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
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Custom VM size
Standard config types for public VMs. Private host VMs can be configured
No
No
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Defined disk IOPS
Not available as local disc (available with SAN)
EBS Optimized instances provided dediated storage network
Yes to a certain degree
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SR-IOV support
Not supported
Supported on some instance types
Yes, Accelerated Network
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Network speeds
1 x public / 1 x private : Can add 1 private but no ability to add additional
Low, moderate, high, 10Gbps, 20Gbps.
Depending of the instance type from 450 Mbit until 20 Gbit
Low, Moderate, High, RDMA
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Add virtual NIC
No ability to add vNIC
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
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Attached / detach block storage
Limited ability with portable 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
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Virtual dedicated cloud
Virtual network created at L2 VLAN level.
Every EC2 instance will be part of a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
Yes Virtual Network
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IP reassignment
Can assign portable public / private IPs
Possible with Elastic IP Addresses
Yes
  Image  
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Manual snapshots image
Supported
Can create Amazon Machine Image (AMI) from EC2 instance
Yes
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Scheduled snapshot image
Not available as native service (could script through API)
Not available as native service
Not available as native service
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API / CLI Snapshot image
Supported
Available
Yes
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Make image public / marketplace
Supported
AWS Marketplace is available to publish and sell application images
Yes Azure Marketplace
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VM import
ISO & VHD imports supported
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
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VM export
VHD image export
you can export previously imported EC2 instances to VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix Xen formats.
Yes
  O/S  
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Windows
Windows Server 2012, 2012R2, 2016 Standard edition
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. 
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Linux
Redhat, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Cloudlinux, CoreOS
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. 
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Bring your own OS
Supported (at own risk)
Yes, you can bring your own Microsoft license
Yes, you can bring your own Microsoft license using HUB
  Control  
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Resize existing VM
Resize vCPU, memory, network speed
Resizing of a VM which is EBS backed supported
Yes
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VM Live Migration
Recovery processes not clearly defined. SLA for recovery defined (in hrs)
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)
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metadata
Supported
Accomplished using tags
Yes
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Parking
Powering off VM does not stop billing
Yes
Yes
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Provision in less than 5 mins
Variable - often more than 5 mins
Yes
Yes
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Provision consistent spec
Although host performance is up to date, there is limited view of host specification
Consistent VM configs available 
Yes
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Reserved instances
Not available
Available
Yes
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Spot instances
Not available
Available
Yes, Azure Low Priority VMs
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Dedicated host (Single tenant)
Dedicated host & dedicated Instances (pay per VM) available
Available
No
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VM to host affinity (network optimised)
Available on didicated hosts
Available using a placement group
Yes
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VM to host anti-affinity
Available on didicated hosts
Manual
Yes, Availability Groups
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Autoscaling VMs (within AZ)
Supported (within DC)
Available using an auto scaling group
Yes
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Autoscaling across AZs/Regions
Not available
Autoscaling is possible across AZs, but not across Regions
No
  Block storage  
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Local HDD
Available (25GB & 100GB primary drive)
Available (instance store on magnetic disks and for some instance types on SSD disks)
Yes, Standard Managed Disk or Standard Storage
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SSD HDD
Yes ability to define local storage (as SSD) 
Available (instance store on magnetic disks and for some instance types on SSD disks)
Yes, Premium Storage
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SAN HDD
Available (25GB & 100GB primary drive)
AWS offers Elastic Block Storage (EBS) as SAN-style block storage
No
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Encryption at rest
Not available on VM drives (only on additional attached storage)
Available for both instance store and EBS volumes
Yes

Matrix Score

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  • IBM
  • Amazon
  • Microsoft
  •  
  • 4 th
  • 1 st
  • 2 nd
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