Data Lake Comparison AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud Platform

May 26, 2022

Data Lake Comparison AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud Platform

Are you searching for a data lake solution as a data-driven organization? You are in the right place. In this post, we'll compare the most popular cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We've analyzed the benefits, features, and pricing models of every provider to help you choose the best fit for your organization.

AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was among the first providers to offer a data lake solution. This enables it to be the most mature product available. AWS offers an S3 Bucket as a Data Lake solution, which can store up to 5 terabytes of data per object, reducing the need for multiple repositories. AWS also has Amazon Glue - a data ETL tool that helps organizations get data into S3, transform it, and move it out.

Without the Glue service, AWS data lake solution is just an object store used to dump data or files. It is inexpensive and offers easy scalability.

AWS Pricing

AWS's pricing is one of its most significant benefits - it's pay-as-you-go: you only pay for what you use. AWS pricing starts at $0.023 per GB for S3 storage, with additional associated costs for data transfer, API requests, and data retrieval.

Azure

Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage is a fully-managed data lake solution. It was designed to store, manage, analyze, and retrieve data of different types and sizes while supporting a range of processing frameworks such as .NET, Hadoop, and Spark.

The Azure solution is built on top of the existing Blob Storage, which can store objects up to 4.77TB in size. It is fully compatible with Hadoop and Spark, which simplifies data processing.

Azure Pricing

Azure's pricing model is a bit different from AWS. It has separate transaction fees, data storage fees, and data movement fees. The Azure Storage costs start at $0.002 per GB, and specific data movement operations cost between $0.01 and $0.08 per gigabyte.

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Storage is a durable and scalable object store that serves as GCP's data lake. Google Cloud Storage is compatible with a wide range of development tools, such as Hadoop and Spark.

Google Cloud Storage has an excellent reputation when it comes to the durability of stored data. Google Cloud Platform offers BigQuery, their data warehouse solution, for processing stored data.

GCP Pricing

Google Cloud Storage also has a 'pay as you go' pricing model, where users only pay for what they store in the data lake. The cost starts at $0.02 per GB, with other costs associated with egress and retrieval depending on the geographical location.

Conclusion

All the cloud providers we have reviewed here provide data lake solutions, and each caters to different needs. AWS is ideal for companies that require a simple solution for data collection and movement, with flexibility and manageable pricing. Azure is among the more affordable options, with excellent compatibility and processing capabilities for seamless data movement. Google Cloud Storage is a reliable option that provides excellent data storage and BigQuery processing.

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