As cloud computing continues to rock the IT world, the comparison among the public cloud computing solutions has become a point of discussion for specialists and business owners alike. In the public cloud domain, there are three major players, namely Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Each of them offers slightly different services to the other. However, they also overlap in several areas.

Public cloud services are classified under three major categories –

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

All the public cloud vendors make these resources available over the internet for an ongoing usage fee.

One of the biggest debate in cloud circles today is the Amazon Web Services (AWS) vs. Google Cloud comparison. In this article, we will compare two of the leading cloud computing services, i.e. AWS and Google Cloud.

Amazon Web Services Vs. Google Cloud Services

In Terms of Service Offerings

AWS offers a wide variety of services, in terms of both quantity and quality. AWS contains specific tools for media transcoding and Streaming, a managed Directory Service. It also has 4 different relational and NoSQL databases.

Google’s toolset is much smaller and mostly focused on classic PaaS and IaaS services. However, Google emphasizes on delivering its limited number of tools very efficiently and quickly. One aspect, in which Google is particularly strong is Big Data.

In Terms of Instances

The AWS compute service, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), divides its instances into nine families thereby creating 38 instance types. These families are capable of bursting, which means that they offer spare processing power that can be expanded when the demand for computing capacity spikes.

The Google Cloud Platform has a much more focused offering. It offers 18 instances that are split into four families. These families are also burst-able but its instance types are standard, high-memory and high-CPU.

In Terms of Pricing

The pricing model for EC2 and Google Cloud’s Google Compute Engine (GCE) is totally different. AWS is billed by the hour, while GCE leverages the “Pay per use” concept and is billed to the minute.

In Terms of Storage

AWS offers Elastic Block Storage, supporting three types of persistent disks: SSD, SSD with provisioned IOPS and Magnetic. The maximum supported size of the magnetic disks is 1TB while the SSD disks are capable of holding much more at up to 16TB.

On the other hand, Google Cloud offers 2 types of persistent block storage: SSD and magnetic. The supported volumes can be as large as 10TB.

In Terms of Speed

Input/output or I/O is the communication between an information processing system and the outside world. There are several factors that can affect the speed of I/O including the number and generation of CPU cores, network speed, number of instances, caching and storage type.

When compared in terms of speed, GCE is the fastest. Google’s overall speed of I/O and its ability to initiate instances rapidly is an advantage over other public cloud services.

Whatever the comparisons may be, finding the apt public cloud provider means researching what one really needs and what that provider has to offer. One conclusion that comes out of the public cloud services battle is that the customer is going to win big with regular price cuts and expanded offerings from each of the service providers.