It’s been quite some time, Microsoft have joined the Cloud computing space with the advent of Microsoft Azure platform. The other players already fighting battle in this scenario are Amazon and Google. It would be an interesting task to compare the three major offerings existing today in the cloud compute market space.
But, first of all let us know, what is a cloud computing? It is an emerging style of infrastructure that allows companies to utilize the Internet (the “cloud” in cloud computing) for functions such as data storage, security, and enterprise applications. In cloud computing, dynamically scalable, virtualized resources are provided as a service over the internet.
Cloud computing customers do not generally own the physical infrastructure serving as host to the software platform in question. Instead, they avoid capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Many cloud-computing offerings employ the utility computing model, which is analogous to how traditional utility services (such as electricity) are consumed, while others bill on a subscription basis. Sharing “perishable and intangible” computing power among multiple tenants can improve utilization rates, as servers are not unnecessarily left idle (which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development).
All of this brings us back to the key solutions present in the market today – Microsoft Azure, Google Apps and Amazon web services (AWS). Here is a quick summary for each of them. Later we will compare them on feature by feature.
Microsoft Azure
The Azure Services Platform (Azure) is an internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities.
Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises.
Azure is still in beta, and Microsoft hasn’t given a schedule for making it a released platform, but developers have just started using it through the Community Technology Preview (CTP).
Google Apps
Google App Engine is a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers.
Google provides you a fixed environment, based around the Python language, the Django development framework, Google’s BigTable database/storage system and Google File System (GFS). At present, developers get 500 MB of storage and compute power for up to about 5 million page views per month for free. Google has also announced pricing for more active sites.
Because this has been built so closely around Google’s own operating environment, it should be relatively easy for developers who know those frameworks to get started.
Amazon Web Services
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) are a collection of remote computing services (also called web services) offered over the Internet by Amazon.com.
It is one of the most mature solutions in the market today. It offers basic cloud infrastructure required (compute power to run virtual machines, storage, communication queues, and database) and allows you to fully control your virtual machines and run your LAMP- or Microsoft-stack applications any way you like.
The one offering, that gets the most attention in AWS is called the Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2), a web service that lets you assign your application to as many “compute units” as you would like, whenever you need them.
The Amazon platform’s basic advantage is simple: you can just use the amount of storage you want, when you want it. The platform itself seems to be very low-level and very flexible. Amazon provides lots of “machine images” with various operating systems, databases, application development environments, etc. so that you can pick the one, suiting to your needs.
| Feature | Microsoft Azure (Azure) | Amazon Web Services (AWS) | Google App Engine |
| Availability | Early private CTP | Yes, commercially available | In public beta |
| Computing Architecture | Provide .NET code for front-end and back-end servers which Microsoft then runs on Windows 2008 virtual machines according to your environment specifications (how many machines of each kind you need, and so on.) |
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows you to upload your XEN virtual machine images to the infrastructure and gives you APIs to instantiate and manage them. |
You write your web application in Python or Django with a specific set of limitations set by Google and submit the application code to them. |
| Load balancing | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Data Storage | Yes: Application storage and SQL Data services | Yes: Simple Storage Service (S3) and SimpleDB | Yes: Database Datastore APIs (Big Table) |
| Message queuing for machine communcations | Yes: Queues in Windows Azure storage | Yes: Simple Queue Service (SQS) | No |
| Integration with other services | .NET services:Access control services, workflow service, service bus.Live MeshVarious Live services (contacts, mail, maps and so on.) | No | Yes, with existing Google services: authentication, mail, base, calendar, contacts, documents, pictures, spreadsheets, YouTube. |
| Tied to the vendor datacenter | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Development tools | Yes, integration into Visual Studio, support for any .NET languages, | Not applicable. Amazon simply runs your virtual machines and does not care which development platform you are using on top of the base OS. |
Yes, have basic editing, local simulation, and deployment tools. Language selection limited to Python and Django.Application-level tools such as Google Web Toolkit (GWT) do not seem to have any integration with Google App Engine. |
So, what’s your decision now?
Popularity: 39% [?]
March 18th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Google have also added Java to their offering:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/gettingstarted/
which is the realm where a lot of Enterprise-level applications operate.
January 8th, 2011 at 7:35 pm
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March 31st, 2011 at 1:24 pm
We\’ll I have been using Google apps for quite sometime now, and I haven\’t had encountered using it yet but I guess I still have several options, I might try Microsoft azure, lets see if this one\’s promising too or live up to my standards. Will update. Thanks for this article.