Cloud Computing Providers: Guide to Navigating the Cloud Landscape

Companies are considering moving to the public cloud. The advantages are the uncomplicated scaling, access to innovative technologies and the flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model. But the question arises as to which of the many cloud computing providers is the right partner – AWS, Azure, Google & Co. all have specific strengths and weaknesses

corona pandemic has reinforced cloud trends. While the global economy suffered severe losses, cloud services were among the few growth sectors.

However, cloud computing provider is not the same as cloud computing provider.There are considerable differencesin the range of services, but the pricing or the level of innovation also differs significantly in some cases.

The top field comprises the big three: AWS, Azure and Google. Providers such as IBM or the Alibaba Cloud are hot on their heels. Several smaller providers can also be of interest to certain sectors or applications.

Table of Contents

A comparison of the most important cloud computing providers

Below we present the most important cloud computing providers and compare their strengths and weaknesses.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing provider from the very beginning. The company launched its first cloud services back in 2006.At that time, the offer focused on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), i.e. the provision of virtualized computer resources via the Internet.

Until 2006, Amazon was primarily the world’s largest online bookseller. However, the success of AWS in the following years was so resounding that the cloud division replaced the e-commerce branch as Amazon’s dominant business model. Andy Jassy, founder of Amazon Web Services and now CEO of Amazon,generated around $60 billion in revenue from AWS in 2021. Regarding market share (32 per cent), Amazon Web Services is currently the leading cloud computing provider.

The rumour persists thatthe book sender only started the cloud business to monetize unused infrastructure capacities. Seasonal load peaks, such as the Christmas business, would have large.

Resources needed would then lay idle for the rest of the year. It would have made sense to rent out the Infrastructure during such phases. As nice as this story reads, various Amazon officials have clarified that AWS was initially intended as a cloud computing provider for external customers.

The technology behind AWS

The heart of AWS is the so-called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).This provides customers with virtual servers physically located in Amazon’s data centres. “Elastic” indicates that computing power can be flexibly added or removed at any time.

The virtual servers are controlled viaAmazon Machine Images(AMI). With their help, servers can be defined similarly to a blueprint. In this way, operating systems can be easily assigned to the machines and application environments can be equipped with the software. It is possible to create individual AMIs and use pre-configured images.

The Graviton processorsthat drive the Amazon data centres are particularly noteworthy on the hardware side. They are now in their third generation, are based on ARM architecture and are particularly well suited for use in the cloud.

The product portfolio

The AWS product portfolio convinces with firm offers in the area of IaaS, analysis functions and artificial intelligence. Customers benefit above all from thehigh level of product maturity; Businesses can rest assured that the services offered will work reliably. For this reason, developers like to use the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings from AWS, which are also available.

However, AWS has certain weaknesses in the area of managed Kubernetes services.That’s because Amazon still sticks with its in-house development, Elastic Container Services (ECS). The competitors Azure and Google cut a better figure here. In general, it can be said that Amazon has traditionally resisted open-source projects.

EC2 instances are typically billed by usage time.But there are also runtime-based models. In each case, a distinction is made according to the instance type: memory, memory, or compute-optimized instances. There are several different package sizes to choose from for each type. This ensures a high degree of flexibility for the customer.

However, this diversity also increases complexity. In many cases, the huge portfolio and the large selection of calculation instances and additional offers mean thatcustomers pay more than they use. Amazon also regularly offers price reductions for selected products. Nevertheless, IT managers at AWS should regularly carry out an analysis of the price structure.

Microsoft Azure

Like AWS, Microsoft Azure is among the early major cloud computing providers; Microsoft started offering related services in 2010.

The product portfolio

Above all, Azure convinces with its variety of products.This includes, among other things, the provision of virtual machines, storage services, databases and content delivery systems. Hadoop can also be obtained via the Microsoft Cloud, IoT applications and machine learning services. At the same time, Microsoft is driving the development of innovative cloud technologies such as the Edge.

Microsoft can also score points in the Platform as a Service area. Many experts consider Azure to be the currently most comprehensive solution.Developers can access tools such as Visual Studio, .NET and Visual C++.Powerful management for API interfaces is also offered. And last but not least, the large ecosystem of partners has a positive impact.

SaaS as a unique selling proposition

In addition to various IaaS and PaaS services, Microsoft also offers Microsoft 365, an extremely popular software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for companies. Microsoft Teams is another example of a very successful SaaS product, which became the main communication tool in many companies, especially during the corona pandemic. This is a unique selling point compared to AWS, which offers no comparable SaaS offerings. So Azure is the complete cloud solution in that regard.

Medium-sized companies rely on Azure.

Due to this huge bandwidth, Azure has become a popular partner for medium-sized companies.Azure offers a corresponding solution in almost every case, no matter which service or technology is required. This has the advantage that different products from different suppliers can be separated, sometimes leading to conflicts. Instead, all Azure services work well together. The result is a well-rounded user experience.

Technical details

At its core, Azure consists of a Windows server in combination with the virtualization software Azure Hypervisor, which is based on Hyper-V.This makes it easy to create virtual machines, which can then be assigned bandwidth, storage space and memory. The Azure fabric controller service allocates hardware resources to the respective application.

A major advantage of Azure is that public cloud services can also be operated locally using Azure Stack. In this way, hybrid scenarios can be easily implemented. This helps companies, for example, to better meet legal requirements for data protection, which might not be possible with a pure public cloud.Azure Stack thus enables real hybrid cloud solutions, representing an important future model for many companies.

The Azure Marketplace

With the Azure Marketplace, Microsoft has created a marketplace for third-party products.Companies can purchase various additional services and extensions here. Open operating systems such as openSUSE, CentOS, Debian Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD are also available here. A Linux version of SQL is also available. This shows that the Microsoft Cloud has opened up a lot from its early days.Open-source applications are now widely supported.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Regarding market share, Google Cloud Platform ranks 3rd after AWS and Azure. Initially, Google Cloud was primarily aimed at the B2C segment, but now there are also offers for B2B customers.Google is trying to break new ground with its cloud service. This happens, for example, by integrating financial, marketing and sales services into cloud computing offerings. In doing so, Google has diversified its cloud revenue model over its competitors. Californians also earn from analysis data, marketing and sales technology and advertising services.In this respect, the ecosystem ideastands at Google more prominent than other cloud computing providers such as AWS, which acts relatively independently of the parent company Amazon.

Even if Google has recently been increasingly creating offers for enterprise customers, the service still needs to improvecompared to AWS and Azure. Although there are interesting offers in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the IaaS and PaaS services range is still manageable overall.

IBM

Even if IBM doesn’t quite match AWS or Azure in the public cloud market, the company still ranks among the top 5 in the industry. This is particularly true since the takeover of Red Hat cost IBM a whopping $34 billion.

The cloud computing provider impresses with itshybrid and multi-cloud solutions, which are becoming increasingly important in the corporate sector. In a hybrid cloud, sensitive data is stored in a specially secured private cloud, while non-critical data migrates to the flexible public cloud. A multi-cloud allows the cloud offerings of different providers to be combined. This has the advantage that the special features of provider A can be combined with the special features of provider B. For the technical implementation of its multi and hybrid cloud offerings, the company increasingly relies on Linux solutions in connection with containers and Kubernetes.

Another specialty of IBM is the product Cloud Paks.This AI-supported software is a framework delivered in containers, which summarizes typical functions and applications for cloud operations in companies. This one-size-fits-all solution makes it easier for companies to create and operate their cloud environment. In addition, Cloud Paks can also be customized for specific industries, enabling the appropriate environments to be deployed even faster.

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud offers an impressive range of IaaS and PaaS products, including:

computing resources
container instances
Block, file and object storage
Virtual Networks and Services
databases
Analysis Services
security services

Although it maintains a global infrastructure, the Alibaba Cloud still needs to be discovered in this country. The offer is aimed primarily at companies from the home market of China.The market research company Gartner estimates that 90 per cent of sales are generated there.

However, because more and more companies are doing business in China and East Asia, it can make sense for such organizations to use the Alibaba Cloud. This helps to cope with the complicated legal situation and local market regulations. With China Gateway, the cloud computing provider Alibaba even hasa special offer for foreign companiesthat want to gain access to the Chinese market.

Oracle Cloud

The Oracle Cloud is aimed primarily at customersalready working with Oracle databases. The offer includes standard cloud storage, network, database and analysis services. PaaS services for database, Java and mobile backend applications are also offered.

However, the product range has some gaps compared to the big three. This is especially true in management automation, hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, DevOps and IoT. Organizations that want to build applications natively in the cloud should look for another cloud computing provider.On the other hand, the Oracle Cloud is well suited for legacy migrations, for example, if your company wants to avoid an expensive expansion of the on-prem data centre. This is mainly due to the sophisticated database structure, support for current licenses and a solid package of SaaS applications for companies.

The Oracle Cloudis cheaperthan other cloud computing providers, such as AWS. But as I said, users must make do with a smaller selection. Also, Oracle has fewer regional centres than its major competitors. Companies should therefore check whether sufficient redundancy is guaranteed here.

SAP

SAP offers a range of cloud services on its SAP Business Technology Platform. Until the beginning of 2021, this offer operated under the name SAP Cloud Platform, after which the product was merged into the SAP as mentioned above Business Technology Platform.The SAP cloud is an interesting option, especially for developers.The solution is based on Hana’s in-memory technology and is particularly suitable for analytics and big data scenarios. Naturally, existing SAP customers, in particular, are enthusiastic about the Walldorf-based cloud services. However, it must be noted that the “go live” with the SAP cloud often turns out to be somewhat more tedious than with the other cloud computing providers presented here.

Salesforce

Salesforce is best known as a SaaS service provider in customer relationship management (CRM). With the Salesforce Platform (formerly Force.com), the company also has acloud offering for the PaaS area. This solution is particularly convincing as a supplement to its own SaaS services and as a basis for IoT applications. However, the training effort for the users is comparatively high.