With so many cloud vendors out there, it’s important you make the right choice and use the best one. At the moment, Amazon Web Services is out in front as the best cloud vendor on the market. It’s reporting increases in revenue and a huge profit increase too.
But, what makes it the better option compared to other big cloud vendors such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure? In this article, we pit AWS against these other two vendors to see just why it comes out on top.
Computing
All three vendors have computing services that people can use. AWS’s Elastic Compute Cloud is by far the most complete and extensive computing service out of the three vendors. It gives you the chance to create your own virtual machines that are either preconfigured or full customized to your desires. It also allows auto-scaling, which is very important as it leads to fewer disruptions and means your computing service scales to your demands automatically.
Storage
Storage is perhaps what most people think about when they see the words ‘cloud software’. Naturally, you want a service that can store a lot of data, securely. AWS has something called Simple Storage Service that allows you to store loads of data and documents in the cloud. It’s been running for far longer that Google's Cloud Storage and Microsoft's Azure Storage. As a result, it’s more reliable and far more extensive. There are even free webinars, articles and tutorials that come with the service.
Analytics
Analytics is very important when you’re looking for a good cloud vendor. Ideally, you want something that handles big data and can analyze things in real-time too. While Google has a lot of products that are useful for handling big data, Amazon EMR (a product of AWS) is a great choice if you want a fast and cost-effective framework to analyze lots of data in real-time. Not only this, but you can also run many of the most popular frameworks like Apache Spark and Presto in EMR too. It’s a complete analytics service and offers more variety than Google and Microsoft.
Data Center Locations
You might not think the data center locations are that big of an issue, but they can be. The closer they are to your base of operations, the better it is. If you want the best user experience, then you’ll need to have access to data centers that are relatively close, to minimize latency. Amazon Web Services has by far the most data center locations all over the world. Azure is second, and Google third.
As you can see, AWS comes out on top in every category, and it’s easy to see why. Amazon launched their service before everyone else and has all the experience to make things work better than the competition. It seems as though it was a classic case of the early bird catches the worm - they got their first, and have firmly established their dominance over the rest of the field. At the moment, AWS is the biggest and most complete cloud vendor on the market today, and everyone else is simply trying to play catch up.
Originally published , updated September 04 2021
