Azure vs AWS vs Google Cloud: The Ultimate Cloud Marketplace Showdown

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In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses and developers increasingly use cloud marketplaces to access various applications, services, and tools. The leading cloud providers—Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)—each offer a unique marketplace experience catering to diverse needs and preferences. This comprehensive blog post will dive deep into the world of cloud marketplaces, comparing Azure, AWS, and Google on multiple dimensions, including user experience, available services, pricing, and more. Let’s get started!

  1. User Experience

Azure Marketplace: Microsoft Azure boasts an intuitive and visually appealing user interface, making it easy for users to navigate and discover relevant services. A well-organized layout and comprehensive search functionality simplify finding, deploying, and managing applications and services.

AWS Marketplace: The AWS Marketplace is similarly user-friendly, with a clean interface allowing users to browse and find services without hassle. It offers advanced filtering options, enabling users to narrow their search based on specific criteria such as pricing, rating, etc.

Google Cloud Marketplace: Google Cloud Marketplace is known for its simplicity and easy-to-use interface. It incorporates Google’s signature minimalist design, making it an enjoyable user experience. Like the other two, Google Cloud Marketplace also provides advanced search and filtering options to streamline the search process.

  1. Available Services

Azure Marketplace: Azure Marketplace offers various applications and services, including AI and machine learning, data analytics, security, and IoT solutions. Microsoft has a robust ecosystem of partners, allowing them to provide a wide variety of third-party applications and services that cater to the unique needs of its customers.

AWS Marketplace: AWS Marketplace has an extensive selection of applications and services, making it one of the most comprehensive cloud marketplaces available. It covers everything from machine learning and big data to application development and security, ensuring users can find the tools to build and maintain their cloud infrastructure.

Google Cloud Marketplace: While Google Cloud Marketplace may not have as many offerings as Azure and AWS, it still provides an impressive range of services, including data analytics, AI and machine learning, and security tools. Google has rapidly expanded its marketplace, consistently adding new applications and services to stay competitive.

  1. Pricing

Azure Marketplace: Microsoft Azure follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model for most services, meaning users only pay for what they use. Some services have a fixed monthly fee, while others provide a combination of free and paid tiers. Azure also offers cost management tools to help users monitor and control their spending.

AWS Marketplace: Like Azure, AWS employs a pay-as-you-go model for most services. It also provides several cost-saving options, such as reserved instances and savings plans. AWS’s cost management tools allow users to track and optimize their spending across various services effectively.

Google Cloud Marketplace: Google Cloud also adheres to a pay-as-you-go pricing model, with additional options for committed use contracts and sustained discounts. Google’s pricing is often considered more competitive than Azure and AWS, making it an attractive choice for cost-conscious users.

  1. Support and Ecosystem

Azure Marketplace: Microsoft Azure has an extensive support network, including an active community forum, documentation, and tutorials. Additionally, users can access premium support services for a fee. The Azure ecosystem is expansive, with a multitude of partners offering a variety of services and applications.

AWS Marketplace: AWS provides many support options, including documentation, tutorials, and an active community forum. Like Azure, AWS also offers excellent support for a fee. The AWS ecosystem is vast, and its marketplace continually grows as more partners, and third-party providers join the platform.

Google Cloud Marketplace: Google Cloud offers a robust support system, including comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and a community forum. While premium support is available for a fee, Google also provides various free resources to help users navigate their cloud journey. The Google Cloud ecosystem is steadily growing, with new partners and third-party providers continually added to the marketplace.

  1. Compliance and Security

Azure Marketplace: Microsoft Azure is known for its commitment to security and compliance, offering various certifications and attestations to meet multiple industry standards. Azure’s Security Center provides users an integrated security monitoring and policy management solution to safeguard their cloud resources.

AWS Marketplace: AWS is equally committed to security and compliance, with numerous certifications and attestations available to address industry-specific requirements. AWS offers robust security features, such as identity and access management, threat detection, and encryption, ensuring a secure cloud environment for users.

Google Cloud Marketplace: Google Cloud takes security and compliance seriously, strongly focusing on data protection and privacy. It offers certifications and attestations to meet industry standards and provides tools like Cloud Security Command Center to help users monitor and manage their cloud security.

Conclusion

The choice between Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Marketplaces ultimately depends on your unique needs, preferences, and budget. Each provider offers a slightly different user experience, range of services, pricing model, and support ecosystem. When selecting a cloud marketplace, consider your organization’s infrastructure, technical requirements, and long-term growth plans.

Microsoft Azure is an excellent choice for organizations already using Microsoft products and services, as it offers seamless integration with their existing infrastructure. AWS Marketplace provides many applications and services, making it ideal for those seeking a comprehensive cloud solution. With its competitive pricing and a strong focus on data protection, Google Cloud Marketplace is an attractive option for cost-conscious users and organizations prioritizing data privacy.

Ultimately, the best cloud marketplace for your organization will depend on your specific requirements and goals. Take the time to explore each platform, evaluate its offerings, and select the one that best aligns with your organization’s vision for the future.

Until next time,

Rob

My thoughts on the Future of the Cloud

Many people in the IT consider containers, a technology used to isolate applications with their own environment, to be the future.

However, serverless geeks think that containers will gradually fade away. They will exist as a low-level implementation detail bubbling below the surface but most software developers will not have to deal with them directly. It may seem premature to declare victory for serverless just yet but there are enough positive signs already. Forward-thinking organizations like iRobot, Coca-Cola, Thomson Reuters, and Autodesk are experimenting and adopting serverless technologies. All major and minor Cloud providers — including the aforementioned ones as well as players like Azure, AWS, GCP, IBM, Oracle, and Pivotal are working on serverless offerings.  If you wan to learn more just take a quick look to this link, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/wincat/validating-hybrid-cloud-scenarios-in-the-server-2012-technology-adoption-program-tap.

Together with the major players, a whole ecosystem of startups is emerging. These startups attempt to solve problems around deployment and observability, provide new security solutions, and help enterprises evolve their systems and architectures to take advantage of serverless. This isn’t, of course, to mention a vibrant community of enthusiasts who contribute to serverless open source projects, evangelize at conferences and online, and promote ideas within their organizations.

It would be great to close the book now and declare victory for the serverless camp, but the reality is different. There are challenges that the community and vendors are yet to solve. These challenges are cultural and technological; there’s tribal friction within the tech community; inertia to adoption within organizations, and issues around some of the technology itself. Also remember to make sure that you are properly certified if you are running cloud-based services, it’s the ISO 27017 certificate that you need for that.

Confusion and the Cloud

While adoption of serverless is growing, more work needs to be done by the serverless community to communicate what this technology is all about. The community needs to bring more people in and explain how serverless adds value. It’s inarguable that there are good questions from members of the tech community. These can range from trivial disagreements over “serverless” as a name, to more philosophical arguments about fit, use-case, and lock-in. This as a perfectly normal example of past successes (with other technologies) breeding inertia to change.

This isn’t to say that those who have objections are wrong. Serverless in its current incarnation isn’t suitable in all cases. There are limitations on how long functions can run, tooling is immature and monitoring distributed applications made up of a lot of functions and cloud services can be difficult (although some progress is being made to address this).

There’s also a need for a robust set of example patterns and architectures. After all, the best way to convince someone of the merit of technology is to build something with it and then show them how it was done.

Confusingly, there is a tendency by some vendors to label their offerings as serverless when they aren’t. This makes it look like they are jumping on the bandwagon rather than thoughtfully building services that adhere to serverless principles. Some of the bigger cloud vendors are guilty of this and unfortunately, this confuses people’s understanding of technology.

Go Big or Go Home

At the very large end of the scale, companies like Netflix and Uber are building their own internal serverless-like platforms. But unless you are the size of Netflix or Uber, building your own Function as a service (FaaS) platform from scratch is a terrible idea. Think of it this way like this, its like building a toaster yourself rather than buying a commoditized, off-the-shelf product. Interestingly, Google recently released a product called kNative. This product — based on the open source Kubernetes container orchestration software— is designed to help build, deploy and manage serverless workloads on your own servers.

For example, Google’s Bret McGowen, at Serverlessconf San Francisco ’18, gave of a real-life customer scenario out on an oil rig in the middle of an ocean with poor Internet connectivity. The customer needed to perform computation with terabytes of telemetry data but uploading it to a cloud platform over a connection equivalent to a 3G modem wasn’t feasible. “They cannot use cloud and it’s totally unfair to say — sorry buddy, hosted functions-as-a-service or bust — their developers deserve to have the same serverless experience as the rest of us” was Bret’s explanation why, in this case, running kNative locally on the oil rig made sense.

He is, of course, correct. Having a serverless system running in your own environment — when you cannot use a cloud platform — is better than nothing. However, for most of us, serverless solutions like Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, or AWS Lambda offer a far smaller barrier to entry and remove many administrative headaches. It’s fair to say that most companies should look at serverless solutions like Lambda first and if they don’t satisfy requirements look at other alternatives, like kNative and containers, second.

The Future…in my humble opinion

It’s likely that some of the major limitations with serverless functions are going to be solved in the coming years, if not months. Cloud vendors will allow functions to run for longer, support more languages, and allow deeper customizations. A lot of work is being done by cloud vendors to allow developers to bring their own containers to a hosted environment and then have those containers seamlessly managed by the platform alongside regular functions.

In the end, “do you have a choice?” “No, none, whatsoever” was Bret’s succinct, brutal answer at the conference. Existing limitations will be solved and serverless compute technologies will herald the rise of new, emerging architectural patterns and practices. We are yet to see what these are but, this is the future and it is unavoidable.

Cloud computing is where we are, and where the world is going for the next decade or two. After that, probably something new will come along.

But the reasons for going to cloud computing in general and the inevitable wind-down of on-premises to niche special functions are now pretty obvious.

  • Security – Big cloud operators have FAR more security people and capacity than even a big enterprise, and your own disgruntled employees don’t have the keys to the servers.
  • Cost-effectiveness – Economies of scale. The rule of big numbers.
  • Zero capital outlay – reduced costs.
  • For software developers, no more software piracy. That’s a big saving on the cost of developing software, especially for sales in certain countries.
  • Compliance – So much easier if your cloud vendor is fully certified, so you only have to worry about your part of the puzzle.
  • Energy efficiency – Big, well-designed datacentres use a LOT less global resources.

My next post in this series will be on “The Past and On-prem and the Cloud?

Until next time, Rob

Azure vs. AWS: Determine Which You Need

Looking to take your on-premise data center or private cloud to the next level? Maybe you’re looking for a better way to allocate your infrastructure resources based on changing workload requirements. Or maybe you want to extend your data backup and recovery capabilities, or need a resiliency solution that is more cost-effective than the system you’re currently using.

Whatever your reasons, migrating to the public cloud has lots of advantages, including substantial cost savings, elasticity, and easy scalability. If you’re ready to take the next step, the question to consider is this: What cloud service should you go with? Continue reading