You're thinking about cloud architecture? How cloudy!
Let's cut to the chase. The two most popular and widely accepted cloud service providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud, both of whom are powerhouses in their own right.
While making a choice between the two might seem like choosing between two equally delicious flavors of ice cream, it's essential to look at them objectively.
In this blog post, we'll compare Google Cloud and AWS on various parameters, including cost, compute, storage, and database options, and more.
Cost
Let's be real. Cost plays a vital role in decision-making, even if it's for cloud services. That's why the budget-conscious should weigh their options here.
Google Cloud offers affordable solutions and has a robust pricing strategy that allows for customization. They also provide discounts for specific workloads, which can keep costs low. In contrast, AWS has a slightly more complicated pricing structure that charges per resource per hour, which can add up.
However, AWS does offer a free usage tier for a year, and their prices are often listed lower than most of their competitors, making them more attractive to those on a budget.
Compute
It's probably not a surprise that both Google Cloud and AWS offer powerful computing capabilities.
Google Cloud provides Compute Engine, its cloud-computing infrastructure service, which delivers virtual machines at scale, all operationalized with user-friendly tools. AWS provides a similar service with Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which also lets you configure and scale virtual machines based on requirements.
While both offer a similar range of compute options, Google Cloud shines with its innovative performance, including their processing units like Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), which Google uses for machine learning, offering super-fast performance for most AI/ML workloads.
Storage and Database Options
Both Google Cloud and AWS provide a wide range of storage options for every need. Google's Cloud Storage offers object storage that is durable, secure, and highly available. AWS provides Simple Storage Service (S3), which has a similar architecture.
Google's other storage options include the Google Cloud Filestore, which provides file storage and a fully-managed NoSQL database service with Cloud Bigtable. AWS's offerings include Elastic Block Storage (system-level storage for volume) and relational databases, like Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service).
That said, Google Cloud's Cloud Spanner can horizontally scale a SQL database across multiple regions and provide high availability, which is not present in AWS.
Customer Support and Reliability
AWS has earned a reputation for its reliability, and Google Cloud is making progress towards the same status. However, AWS's customer support is unparalleled. They have a support tier system available that includes enterprise, business, and basic support.
When it comes to reliability, AWS is at the top. Its uptime has consistently stayed above 99.99%. Google Cloud continuously adds new features and services, which can impact service reliability but have shown to promise.
Conclusion
So, which cloud platform should you choose? Both Google Cloud and AWS stand as one of the best in cloud architecture. While Google Cloud provides affordable pricing with great innovative features like TPUs and Cloud Spanner, AWS takes the lead with its customer support and reliability.
In conclusion, it's essential to decide which cloud service provider aligns with your specific requirements, workload, and budget before making your decision.